Country Diary: Lake District

Enjoying the mosaic of blossom and 40 shades of green foliage that Lakeland has been so gloriously presenting, it is hard to imagine flames sweeping across the fell sides overhead and a black pall of smoke above. This happened nearly 50 years ago on Pavey Ark when snuff-dry ledges on this Langdale crag erupted in a sheet of flame.

Retired wool merchant Alan Austin, who was to write the Fell and Rock climbing guide for the valley, was one of five climbers on the crag. He remembers scrambling desperately to reach the top, nylon ropes melting and his spectacles obscured by smuts. This story illustrates misgivings that Torver farmer Arnold Lancaster has had over recent years as he tends his sheep lambing in fields below Coniston Old Man and despairs of the edicts to reduce sheep on the fells, so producing lank, unkempt grasses. Lancaster, whose lean frame was wracked by two successive heart attacks two years ago but who still shepherds on told me: "Fires on fells have now become a probability if this is a hot summer. Because the grass isn't getting grazed in the quantities it once was, it comes to seed. It goes dead and is like tinder. Someone will drop a cigarette and that will be it. Am I sure of this? I will forecast it."

There is another view to this incendiary subject, however, and beekeeper Stephen Barnes, who keeps hives on the fell side above Keswick took off his veil and put down the "smoker" he had been pacifying bees with to point across the vale to Skiddaw.

"I would like someone like the National Trust take action," he said. "Our heather is shrinking. If the heather was burned regularly under a proper management scheme it would not only flourish but reduce the impact of an accidental fire." Until then the sunshine will shine for bees already plagued with plummeting numbers, but there will be even less much-prized local heather honey as a result.