Tortoiseshell

[ellarien]

DSC08654
Originally uploaded by ellarien.

There's a long disused road over the moors on the edge of Sheffield that we call the Sheep Track. Somewhere out there they built decoy buildings in the War, hoping to distract the bombers from the city. (It didn't work, so's you'd notice, which is why most of the department stores are now in 1950s buildings, but that's another story.) These days it's just a rough track over empty moorland, with sheep and tumbledown stone walls and a hazy view over the valleys of the city.

It's lovely up there when the heather's in bloom, but the day we went this year was a few days too early for that. We did meet a small clutch of bright new tortoiseshell butterflies, disporting themselves in a thistle patch.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

which is why most of the department stores are now in 1950s buildings

Now, that's interesting: because most of the department stores around here are in 50s-70s buildings because there wasn't anything there in the first place, not because the old stores were bombed.

[ellarien]

Well, you know what they say about the differences between European and American history and geography (100 years vs 100 miles.)

Sheffield was already a big industrial city well before WW2, and of course the steel industry made it a target. (I have no idea why the shopping area got flattened while the Victorian town hall escaped and City Hall, which is an old fashioned music venue, just had a few shrapnel scars; most of the Victorian railway station survived, too.)

[ellarien]

I should add, also, that the UK still mostly keeps its department stores in the city centres rather than on the outskirts. (Sheffield has a newish out-of-town mall, slightly larger than the smallest one in Tucson and with its own transit interchange for trains, buses and trams, but the city centre is still very much in business.)