Wild Daffs abundant on Tarka trail
I have been experiencing some technical problems and a few network issues, with both my computer and my mobile phone, so apologies for the lateness of my Daff-blogs this year. The photos on this blog-post were taken 15th March. They were very early this year.
Had all my gadgetry been fully operational; this post would have been written at least a month ago.
North Devon is very much a 'man-scape'. The green desert, I used to call it, before I moved here. Endless boggy, slightly undulating, high up cultivated squares, as far as you can see, where most of the woods are conifer plantations and little natural environment exists.
North Devon is huge, remote and sparsely populated. Unlike down south it is largely unvisited. The south is crammed with twee towns and seaside resorts, where as the North just seems an endless green footpathless desert of undulating Sheep and Cow fields, with the odd tiny village occasionally spotted.There are two main rivers in North Devon; The Taw and the Torrige. I haven't really explored the Taw valley yet. But this day, on the 15th March, I explored the Torridge.
Both valleys are beset by conifer plantations all the way up to the edges of the moors, from which they arise. I really felt sceptical about my prospects for being able to find any sizable quantities of Wild Daffs after remembering the ancient Oak forests around the south side of Dartmoor, where I used to find them.
Watergate
There is a cycle path going up the valley of the river Torrige, called the Tarka Trail, after the book/film 'Tarka the Otter'. It used to be a railway line, but like so many it was cut, by Dr Beeching in 1962.
There are a number of little parking places, all along this cycle path, but I chose to park at a place called Watergate, but not the same one as in the Nixon scandal.
The muddy bottomed clay valley was criss crossed by braided rivulets of cloudy clayey water. This was sided by fairly swampy land. Up a bit was the level twisting cycle path, all set in a deep valley.
As shown on my map; the area was mostly occupied by conifer plantations, under which very little can grow. But most felled ares seemed to be being replaced by allowing native trees to find their own way there. it also looked like the odd patches of native woodland had been left, when the land had been changed to quick growing coniferous trees; presumably after the one of the world wars, when there was a timber shortage and in the following decades we lost 50% of our native deciduous woodland.
Wild Daffs
All along the river banks and the not entirely swampy parts of this valley bottom, also along the verges on both sides of the cycle path, were an abundance of Wild Daffs and Wood Anemones. The most I have seen so far in North Devon.
The colonies were not all in a few solid huge established areas, like the ones in the Dart and Teign valleys on Dartmoor, with their huge ancient and unbroken deciduous forests. But instead strung along in varying sized clumps all the way along this little valley and where the tree type allowed.
