Grass Guide & Senior Running: Sun 11th August 2024

Find Yorkshire fog, a fox's face, a cock's foot and the plant with pyjama legs in your summer neighbourhood. Dragonflies with photographer Zaf Ali. And an Olympian feat for half a dozen elderblokes.

Four Spotted Chaser dragonfly - Photo Zafar Ali

Morning. Summer grasses and dragonflies today, along with a very personal piece about six men of a certain age cantering and stumbling across northern England before our Olympians set out to beat the world.

We now have over 170 posts in our archive, covering all manner of humans, trees, frogs, newts, cyclists, runners, walkers, ecologists, spiders, fungi, wolves, bumblebees, bushes, bedbugs and lots lots more.

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Sunday Grass

I hope you’ve been out looking at the green (brown, yellow, pink and white) grasses of home this summer. The ecologists we’ve heard from here have told us how grasses are a crucial source of food and shelter for a host of insects and animals. But they also look spectacular, if you actually let them grow.

Our feature with busy botanist Gerry Firkins a few weeks ago introduced us to the wonders of a group of flowering plants that feed the vast majority of humans and livestock. (Rice, wheat and maize are all from the several hundred thousand species of grass across the world.)

The key feature of grasses is that they grow from the base of the plant, not the tip, so they can be browsed and trampled by animals, and then still grow back. Grasses also stay alive so humans can mow them all summer, so we can run around after footballs or whack cricket boundaries.

I hope to run a more comprehensive feature on all this (for full subscribers) with Gerry, but looking at the August grasses flowering in the sun just now, here’s a little more about a few of the species he helped me identify:

Cock’s Foot Grass: Found almost everywhere, from urban and meadow grasslands, to moors and woods. So named as it can be draped across your hand to look a bit like a gnarled chicken’s foot. Watch for it in flower, however, when it looks much more spectacular.

Perennial Rye Grass: Common tough stemmed grass for lawns and sports fields. Watch for tiny yellow anthers hanging out of the grass florets in warm weather.

Meadow Grass: Several species, including Annual and (below) Rough Meadow Grass, which were often used in the seasonal rhyme: “Here’s a tree in summer” - pick stem as it is now, “Here’s a tree in winter” - pull up, stripping seeds from the stem, to leave an uncanny mini winter tree, “Here’s a bunch of flowers” - reveal an amazing bouquet of fluffy seeds in your fingers, “And here’s an April shower” - throw seeds up in the air to cascade onto your victim’s head.

Timothy Grass: Named after an American farmer who introduced it across the Atlantic 300 years ago. Gerry tells me if you pull a tiny floret from the flower head (which eventually grow into part of the seed) they’re said to look like the face of a fox. (Perhaps with a mouse’s tail drooping out of its mouth? You need some imagination - see above right).

Yorkshire Fog: Very common, with its grey and in the right light, pinkish plumes, said to resemble a mist on the moors, or alternatively the smog from a Yorkshire factory. It was known as the grass with pyjama legs, says Gerry, thanks to its striped pyjama-like stem.

• Check the wonderful Field Studies Council for easy to use, portable illustrated guides to all kinds of wildlife. Their £4 (+ postage) grasses guide is here.

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Born to Run, Slowly

Since I have a pair of shorts and running shoes, I feel an obvious affinity with fellow athletes like Louie Hinchliffe and Carl Lewis in an Olympic year. Like Louie, I’ve even joined a South Yorkshire running club.

I’m not a sprinter, however, so as Paris 2024 approached, I joined some endurance running friends heading in the opposite direction. Do you fancy running halfway across England? Of course, I said, after reading dozens of inspirational running stories of people battling the elements for hours on end. Who wouldn't?

The Coast to Coast Walk is now an official 197 mile long national trail, not least because the parliamentary constituency of Richmond is en route, which you may remember is overseen by an obscure MP who was one of our former prime ministers.

The trail was originally designed by famous Lake District hill walker and writer Alfred Wainwright, who enjoyed out of the way walking so much that his popular C2C route (starting at St. Bees in Cumbria and ending at Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire), heads disconcertingly north west for several miles first, apparently to take in a notable light house, before heading back east in a more reassuring direction.

We’re not quite decrepit, but as we amble out along the north Atlantic coast, it becomes clear that we’re carrying various medical conditions, and had sufficient operations and injuries to mean we’re probably going to walk up most of the hills, and stop at quite a few pubs and cafes. The plan is to do 20-25 miles a day and reach the half way point in four and a half days, come home, then do the next 95 miles next year. How Olympian we are.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to set you up for an hour by hour account of our gritty journey. But there might be a few things we learned that are worth sharing.

You just keep going, for example. The final section on day one was a path round Ennerdale Water involving two miles of unexpected jagged rocks and a settling rainstorm. You get there, one step at a time. And your arrival at the Youth (ha!) Hostel as someone else pulls up in a car is so much sweeter. You can tell their raised eyebrows in your bedraggled direction are full of admiration.

The Lake District has some very steep paths. Fell runners run up and down these things. For me, the ups are a relief, as you can clamber as slow as you like without the descending fear of breaking your leg at every step.

The cheery and patient veteran Cumbrian fell runner amongst us picks his moments to start running again, and I realise we’re actually crossing a mountainous national park pretty quickly, all things considered. The fact that two years ago he completed the 66 mile Bob Graham Round of 42 of the highest peaks in the Lake District in under 24 hours is not relevant at this time.

We meet other people doing the route. Some seem to be using the walk to remember family members or friends, and maybe mark their passing by taking on a brutal physical exploit across the wild countryside. Others are travelling 197 miles across England simply because they have time and the route is there.

The mountains end, we have a fun day of skipping over interminable bogs and moors, and then a day in old working valleys full of gritty quarries apparently used for Dr Who alien landscape sets in the 1970s, and the crumbling ruins of centuries-old metal works. We imagine the ghosts of grimy lead smelters looking out from their terrible factories to watch a gang of happy grey-haired runners passing by.

We run into Reeth, at 106 miles our end point for this year, and it feels curious that the locals are not cheering us in to celebrate our incredible achievement. So we go for a pint and try to reflect on what we’ve done, and why we’ve done it.

But you can’t really work it out at that stage, you’re too knackered, and full of it all. In the end, I realise it’s the doing of such a thing, a very big and difficult thing for someone like me, an ageing type one diabetic carrying insulin injections, emergency glucose tablets, and a stingy Yorkshire folk’s energy drink (a mix of orange juice, water and a salt sachet pinched from a local cafe).

It’s the days full of different landscapes and the ever changing challenges of how to get through them, and the fact you’ve shared it all with very supportive friends who get the idea too. The challenge is the point, and as so many proper athletes have been reflecting this week, you don’t really know what you can do unless you try.

We have sunglasses and a gnarled tree. We can be U2.

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Summer Dragons

Now’s the time to look for dragonflies and damselflies. We’re in the middle of the season right now, when the insects dart around local ponds and rivers, especially on calm sunny days. There are around 20 species around here, all part of the Odanata insect family that were zipping around our watercourses before the dinosaurs.

Local nature photographer Zafar Ali has sent us some recent pictures, mostly from Ramsley Reservoir. “They’re surely the masters of the air,” he says.

“I love the way they can come to a dead stop from high speed flight, and switch direction. It's a pity that once they emerge as adults they only last for around a month. They mate, lay, hunt and then die. Depending on species they live at the bottom of the pond in their larval stage for up to five years. And as they've been around since prehistoric times, I think they've got it right!”

• See https://www.instagram.com/zafs_nature_notes

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What’s On Out There (from Sunday 11th August)

A tiny selection from our monthly, regularly updated, What’s On Out There post. This service is now free and open to all, but takes me ages to collate, so a pocket money paid subscription to help keep you all informed would really help. It costs £4 of pocket money every month, you get access to the whole archive and you’re helping pay the bills to keep all this going.

Sun 11th - Sheffield Conservation Volunteers - Wadsley Common

Mon 12th - Butterfly surveying, Wardsend Cemetery

Tues 13th - Thurs 15th - Summer at Manor Lodge - castles & dragons week (£4.50 / child)

Weds 14th - Social Walk from Longshaw (5m)

Thurs 15th - South Yorkshire Orienteers - Give It A Go - Clifton Park, Rotherham

Sat 17th - Wadsley Common archaeology walk

Sat 17th - Parkwood Springs conservation morning

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Photo by Zafar Ali

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