A muggy and often wet late summer had given way to a crisp and sunlit autumn morning. Hawthorns were thick with fruit, the best crop for a few years, the bracken was coppery against the blue sky, and on Big Moor red deer stags were edging round a harem of hinds. They weren’t bellowing quite yet, but the rut was only days away. This, for me, is the best time of year in north‑east Derbyshire, the gritstone cool and rough to the touch, the world somehow better defined.
My reverie was sharply interrupted with a warning to watch where I was treading. I stopped. My companion told me I’d almost stepped in it – “it” being a brown splodge adjacent to my boot that I assumed was canine in origin.
