Cotswolds and Celandines

 Yesterday I was walking in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. It was a well planned five-miler, taking in three good churches (Turkdean, Hampnett and the magnificent wool church of Northleach – all open), a decent lunch, and glorious rolling countryside with wide views – pastureland and paddocks, drystone walls, picturesque villages, cloud shadows passing over the landscape. We didn't get the unbroken sunshine promised in the weather forecast, but the sun came and went, never staying long enough to really warm things up. Disappointingly, there was not a single butterfly to be seen – it wasn't quite warm enough – but bumblebees were flying, and at one of the churches darker, smaller bees were swarming high up on the South wall. Birds were singing – a cheery twitter of small birds, rooks conversing loudly as they built their nests, skylarks rising singing from the fields, buzzards and kites mewing... As for the wild flowers, these were in their early spring glory, with snowdrops, crocuses, primroses and daffodils all in full flower, along with speedwell, lungwort and a few early windflowers. Also in full flower was that golden harbinger of spring, the Lesser Celandine – a flower that Wordsworth loved so much he devoted three (pretty bad) poems to it, and wanted to have one carved on his gravestone. That stone, however, in Grasmere churchyard, remains unadorned, the celandine featuring instead on his memorial plaque, originally intended for Westminster Abbey but now in Grasmere church. Alas, the sculptor – Thomas Woolner, no less – embellished the plaque not with the ground-hugging Lesser Celandine that Wordsworth loved but with the upright, poppy-related Greater Celandine. Oh dear.