Feeling the heat over dry spring and low butts

IT is not just the moor tops turning brown with the heat and lack of rain.

The fields below in the Aire Valley, cropped close to the earth by sheep, are looking bare. With rainfall at only one-tenth of seasonal norm, says the weatherman, the land is gasping for water.

The soil on my allotment is rock-hard where I haven’t watered, and the level in my butts is getting low. A painful business.

This feels uncannily like a reprise of Lockdown One a year ago, when we had a spring heatwave and drought week after week. I blamed the weird weather for the loss of veggies and the poor size of my potatoes, and it looks like this excuse may come in handy once again.

This time, I don’t think neighbour Roger will trail a pipe across the road from his house to fill the barrels. It was broken by traffic and, anyway, he’s gone boating on the canals for the summer.

The sheep are huddling together under any shade they can find.

They have given the grass a crew-cut and their lambs are too hot to gambol.

In the field, I notice a black sheep with one white lamb and a dark brown one. What’s she been up to, I wonder?

If the weather carries on like this, it will be water rationing time again. This is supposed to be one of the wettest parts of England and our reservoirs were full to the brim over the winter.

But that will not stop profit-hungry Yorkshire Water urging us to use less what falls from the sky, free.

It must be hell in the cities but at least the warmer weather tempts people outdoors, where the dreaded coronavirus hates to circulate.

That is very much a well-needed silver lining in every lack of cloud.