“Buxton, Derbyshire: I have long pondered the word ‘Hogshaw’, which describes a small area of the town that is centred by a tributary of the River Wye.

Aside from the clear, if intriguing, pig-related associations, the name always conjures childhood memories of old dustcarts brimming with rubbish and adding to Hogshaw’s small mountain of bottles and tins, topped latterly by wind-shredded plastic.

Until the early 1980s Hogshaw was the town tip and while it might once have been unbeautiful it has been the site of my botanical encounter of 2020.

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Helleborine in Hogshaw

Broad-leaved helleborine is a scarce and beautiful flower. The tallest spikes can be 80cm high, the upper third wreathed in blooms.

The individual flowerheads vary from ghostly green-white through to deep rose, but all possess, centred in a cup-shaped inner lip, a bowl of dark-flecked lipstick pink.

It may be among the commoner of the Epipactis orchids but I’d never previously seen it and Derbyshire has only about 100 such localised sites.

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Thriving in a Wasteland

What’s most intriguing about the orchid is how it has flourished for decades in an unprepossessing patch of wasteground, topped by willow scrub and layered with an understorey of bramble and the fruitiest feral raspberries you’ve ever seen.

Just across the fence is a tumulus of Buxton’s historic waste, apparently deep with ancient hoards of asbestos.

This is not the whole story. If the helleborine were an emblem of any aspect of Hogshaw it is the redemptive power of nature once the human leash has been slipped.

Across the whole site there have flourished hazy stands of willowherb and sunshine carpets of ragwort.

The old railway clinker and cinders from a million coalfires have been carpeted in vetches, knapweed and clover that are busy with butterflies and bumblebees.

The former land-uses make Hogshaw the classic brown-field site, but its unscripted flourishing since the tip was decommissioned has seen it morph into one of Buxton’s best bits of wild ground.

How sad that it is now earmarked for major development and for once I am pinning my hopes on historical pollution to halt that destroyer of  urban nature: the often unimaginative and abiotic banality of modern housing.”

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Read the full article about the efforts to save Hogshaw on Mark Cocker’s website.