The Wurzels once sang about a giant marrow, to the immortal words “Oh what a beauty / I never saw one as big as that before”. I can’t imagine what they were referring to. Anyway, today in beautiful winter sunshine after days of rain, it was perfect weather for digging brambles out of the South-facing butterfly bank above the old railway track (which I’m standing on in the photo). The ground, too, was ideally soft and well-watered, so the roots came out with hardly any digging. Just before it was time to stop, my fork struck a large lump of wood, right under a small tuft of bramble stalks. I removed the loose earth above it, and made out to my pleasure half-a-dozen stalks that had been clipped off at ground level in earlier years as too difficult to dig out. Well, today was the day, and after really not very much wriggling with the fork, pulling and leaning on the fork handle, I triumphantly wrenched this grandfather-of-all-brambles from the ground, including to my surprise the yard-long taproot below my right hand. In short, a monster, if not a marrow.

The bank, by the way, is the reserve’s best place for Gatekeeper butterflies – we saw 35 there at once, on a stretch of the bank which was well weeded and grassy at the time. Now we have a far longer stretch all de-brambled at once, so perhaps we’ll have a bumper butterfly year, let’s hope so. And there are quite a few young Buddleias (“butterfly bushes”) self-seeded on the bank, a pleasantly “railway” feature, so the signs are good.