Constable Country

Penny and I have been away for a week to celebrate our Ruby Wedding, staying in that delectable (and to us, relatively little-known) part of England known as Constable Country. Thanks to the National Trust, the settings of the painter's most famous works in the valley of the River Stour, which links Suffolk and Essex, are remarkably little-changed. Given my surname, it is perhaps unsurprising that I have always been fond of The Hay Wain - above. Below is my younger son's photograph of the same scene this week, complete with his somewhat abstract rendering of a wain.

The valley is rich in wildlife. While we baked ourselves in the sunshine on the terrace of Flatford Mill, overlooking the scenes above, a Red Admiral butterfly swooped down and a grass snake swam across the millpond, using exactly the same sinuous movements as it employs on land.

I couldn't take the moth trap because of all the other necessities we had to cram in the car, but in the warm weather, the grand old 17th century timber-frame house where we spent the week acted as a sort of super-trap on its own. Here are four moths which were dozing on the walls of our landing yesterday morning, after we left the window open and a light on.

From the top left, they are a very appropriate Ruby Tiger on the carpet, a delicate Least Carpet on the wall, a Smoky Wainscot - Wain again - on the carpet and the micro-moth Udea prunalis, back on the wall.

These were good to see but the greatest excitement of the holiday was a Puss Moth caterpillar in the final stages of its development, rushing to pupate when it was spotted and photographed by my younger son - second picture in the split photo below. Shortly afterwards, I saw the Lime Hawk Moth cattie shown immediately below, an exquisite pink beast with a bright blue horn on its tail.

The Lime Hawk's colour combo is genuinely startling, especially when you consider that the adult moth almost exactly replicates the greens and browns of military camouflage. Here are a couple of closer looks at that marvellous horn:

Cinnabar caterpillars are two-a-penny but I always enjoy photographing them - and seeing the blaze of ragwort which has successfully defied a misinformed campaign by horseowners to persuade landowners to root it out. Here are a couple of the plants acting as mobile restaurants, and another caterpillar enjoying the warmth of the sun-baked Suffolk roads. It's interesting that their warning colouration - for they are poisonous to birds - is the same as the combination of yellow and black used in nuclear radiation signs.

The grandchildren were with us some of the time and engaging vigorously with Nature, as ever, They caught and briefly kept as pets a number of small fish, which I'm glad to say were later repatriated into the cooling waters of the Stour.