Bellamy’s Bank is a 200-metre-long reef of limestone running in an elevated line along the north bank of the River Wye. If there is a more beautiful, more flower-rich spot in Derbyshire, I don’t know it.
This week, when it’s been at its peak, it has assaulted all the senses, although the sheer abundance of colour is perhaps its most powerful attribute: from the dense yellow of goldenrod, or the balls of bright red in the orpine, to the starbursts of magenta from heads of greater knapweed and the long stretch of saw-wort, which runs from the eye, tall and swaying in the breeze, in a great recessional of quaking pinks or pale purples.
For me, however, the plant I associate most with the place is wild marjoram – not just for its own frothy tide of roseate flowers, nor the relentless attention they draw from half a dozen bumblebee species, but for the heady scent of Mediterranean cooking. The air is so thick with herbs on Bellamy’s Bank that you can almost taste it.
This fragrance and the site’s rainbow spread seem to interpenetrate in some strange way, and blended to both, to complete its synaesthetic effect, is the soundscape. It comes from the Roesel’s bush-crickets, which are almost everywhere and whose note is a high-pitched, penetrating reel produced by the crepitation of their wings. Since the musicians are invariably invisible and their zizzing chorus without clear geographical location, it seems as if all the parts – the colours, the perfume, the sounds – are fused in an elemental summery hum.
There is a curious ironic link between the insect and the name Bellamy’s Bank. It draws on visits made here in 1954 by the botanist David Bellamy, whose distinguished career ended in ignominy because of his climate change denial. Until the 1970s, Roesel’s bush-crickets were largely confined to the Thames basin, but they have since undertaken a remarkable expansion (now as far north as Scarborough), because of elevated temperatures. The first Derbyshire records were part of this spread and the species probably set up camp on the banks of the Wye around 2019, the year that Bellamy died.
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