Frome, Somerset: Dippers and fritillaries and pink campion … there is a deep satisfaction in accumulating associations with a regular haunt
Enchantment surely fills the eyes of first-time visitors who come upon this little stone bridge over the stream. Do they marvel at the judgment of hands in building, wedding rock with rock, face against face? Do they arrive on a brighter morning than this, one on which sunbeams chase each other under the arch and cast sparkling reflections of water on the underside? Does their pulse quicken watching the brook breaking out of its tunnel and skittering over the pebbled bed, hastening through even in times of sluggish drought? Me? I see a bird that isn’t there.
This summer, I named a boulder by the foot of the bridge as the Dipper Stone. One afternoon, placing palms on the ledge, I leaned over and came closer to a dipper than I ever had and perhaps ever will. There it stood in its classic “Where next?” stance. A dipper is fine doing squat-thrusts where it can see you, but this one didn’t like forced intimacy and sped off downstream, with pointy tail and scudding wings.
It shot past what I think of as the fritillary glade. For there, in the enervating peak of the July heatwave, the butterflies were all beat and flutter, energetic insects defying a world of listlessness. The fritillary dance is a seasonal memory, dimmed with the dying of its backdrop. I daresay it will come back next year when growth brings back the glade’s summer look.
That fleeing dipper passed the campion patch too, a vision in pink, a stand of colour that was succeeded by so many pepperpot heads, ripe seed spilling into cupped hands. But that was so 2025. There was no blush of campion on that ground this year.
Resident naturalists who return again and again to a place create for themselves what the writer Robert Macfarlane calls a “storied” landscape – landmarks crowded with the ghosts of things observed. There is both pleasure and satisfaction in the return of spirits to familiar haunts. Perhaps there is equal delight in sheer serendipity and tales to come of the unexpected.
Today, I should stay sharp, for I might see a dipper along the stream. Or not.
