Taking a Walk
If you stroll in Fermyn Woods later this month, you will probably encounter several bottoms raised in the air before a muddy puddle or fox faeces. Don’t fear the worst: this bizarre ritual is one of the most innocent acts of midsummer worship.
This wood, in the heart of the romantic old Northamptonshire hunting forest of Rockingham, is one of the hotspots for the Purple Emperor – the most charismatic and elusive of butterflies, which rules the canopies of English woodlands in late June and July.
Victorians worshipped this insect as the ‘big game’ of butterflies. The male flashes iridescent purple in the sunshine and does battle with any other insect or bird foolish enough to enter its air space, above the tops of oak trees. Old butterfly collectors called it ‘His Imperial Majesty’ because it haughtily refuses to descend from its tree-top kingdom to feed on flowers, as most butterflies do. Collectors devised extendable nets. But they also had another trick.
Like many aristocrats, the Purple Emperor is not averse to slumming it, and likes nothing better than dipping its yellow proboscis into a muddy puddle, or horse manure, or the decaying carcass of a rabbit. Stinky things tempt it down from the treetops on sunny mornings.
Today’s butterfly obsessives no longer collect the Emperor, but admirers are keener than ever to photograph its dazzling wings. Fish pastes are an irresistible lure (particularly a shrimp paste from Ghana, shito), smeared on forest rides. When the Emperor descends, people after the perfect photograph crawl towards the feasting butterfly. Hence the raised rear ends.
Northamptonshire is one of our most overlooked treasures – we tend to whizz through the county on the M1 – but, when I first walked in Fermyn, I wasn’t particularly wowed by it. The woods were mostly cleared of broad-leaved trees for conifers in the 20th century.
The author B.B, who wrote Brendon Chase, a marvellous children’s adventure story, was a Purple Emperor devotee and is believed to have reintroduced the Emperor to Northamptonshire’s woods.
Then, a few decades ago, when most of Fermyn’s miserable conifers were removed, the first trees to replace them were sallows, fast-growing, scrubbylooking willows to which we hardly give a second glance. Purple Emperors do though: the female (which is larger, and not purple) lays eggs on sallow, and the caterpillars feed and hibernate here. Fermyn’s sallow thickets made it, until recently, the Emperor’s favourite realm.
I spent much of my childhood searching for, and failing to find, Purple Emperors. A few years ago, when I meandered along the rides of Fermyn for a day, I saw 57. The naturalist and leading disciple of the Purple Emperor, Matthew Oates, has clocked up more than a 100 in a day here. There are also Purple Hairstreaks, an iridescent, tree-top butterfly like the Emperor, but much smaller, and White Admirals, the most graceful of woodland butterflies. They glide, like ballroom dancers, through dappled sunshine seeking honeysuckle.
Oates believes the best Emperorspotting territory in the country is now Knepp Wildland – a 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex which has been ‘re-wilded’, causing great thickets of sallow to cover former fields of maize. In both Fermyn and Knepp, nature is running wild. It seems to inspire people to do the same.