If you stand on Bonsall Moor facing north, you look across a highly unusual patch of the Peak District. It is, for example, totally unlike the encircling cattle country, most of which is a uniform monoculture of chemically inflated emerald.<\/p>\n
The fields here, by contrast, are tiny, irregularly contoured and across all, to the horizon, are thousands of mature hawthorns, some of them self-coppicing giants, and sprinkled with elders or gorse bushes, with a scattering of elm and ash. The land looks complex, of varied hue and wildlife-rich. It is great for flowers and insects, and any layperson could readily guess its attractions for birds. In this celebrated mast year, the hawthorns\u00a0are weighed down with\u00a0crimson and scarlet fruit, and\u00a0you can almost hear now the winter thrushes that will descend to feast on its bounty.<\/p>\n
Looking north across Bonsall Moor, with old mining works in the foreground. Photograph: Mark Cocker<\/p>\n
It is strange, then, to reflect that all this is because of pollution. Bonsall Moor was an industrial land, although not in a conventional urban, smut-and-smoke Lowryesque sense. It was open country devoid of natural feature. In the 17th century, Celia\u00a0Fiennes wrote of neither \u201chedge, nor tree, but only lowe dry stone walls\u201d. Yet the ground would have been warrened with holes and heaped with spoil where miners had followed subterranean rakes of galena. Just a tenth of these mineral seams would have yielded the all\u2011important lead ore, and this whole landscape, whether you look north towards Winster, east towards Cromford, or south to Wirksworth, was lead country.<\/p>\n
The labours undertaken in its pursuit are awe-inspiring. One problem was the flooding of the shafts, which often entailed digging\u00a0\u201csoughs\u201d to let the water drain off. One just north of Bonsall ran for 4.5 miles and took 21 years to excavate. Another issue was lead\u2019s toxicity. In his glorious exploration of the cultural importance of mining, Under a Metal Sky, Philip Marsden<\/a> describes\u00a0smelting works in Germany\u2019s Harz mountains where, if the wind blew in the wrong direction, the fumes killed all\u00a0the cattle. Here it was the toxic lode in the ground that poisoned the livestock and halted their grazing. Bonsall, therefore, owes\u00a0much of its present wildlife-rich condition to poison.<\/p>\n