Pye Flatts Meadow

We spent a wonderful few hours at Pye Flatts Meadow this morning, which is an SSSI about 6 miles (8Km) to the west of Barnsley. This is ancient unimproved meadow in an area where coal, stone and clay were extracted in the past. I've never seen so many orchids on one site before - simply thousands of Common Spotted orchids flourish here, all descended from an original plant that was propagated on at Kew Gardens and then returned to the site. Many thanks to Danny Clarke who owns the site and led our walk today and thanks also to Natural England who support his efforts. I chose this landscape view as I loved the grey against the yellow of the flowers. I think the majority of flowers here are Rough Hawkbit and Ox-eye Dasies, and not all areas of the site support the same range of species.

We followed up our visit with lunch at Cannon Hall and a short walk with mum and my brother. There were lots of bees enjoying the blue cranesbills today but as ever they were moving just too fast to get a decent image.

p.s. I've posted two images together today, the one for yesterday will be superseded by this one, so I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who commented on my 1000th blip and also to say I am working on saying thank you to everyone who left me a commen.