Marskeswaledale.com
Nature
The land around Marske is excellent for wildlife and nature. There is a wide variety of habitats including pasture, woodland, moorland, heather and grass moor, scrub and exposed limestone cliffs.
Resident birds include marsh tit, green and great spotted woodpeckers, and tawny owls. On the beck look out for dipper, grey wagtail and wintering goosander. In the spring listen out for cuckoo, curlew, common redstart, garden warbler as well as blackcap, chiffchaff, willow warbler, and more rarely the pied flycatcher. If you visit during the summer you may see slow worms, spotted flycatchers, swifts, swallow and house martins. In the winter the valley often has large flocks of winter thrushes.
Trends of the population of two of the most common moorland birds, Lapwings and Curlews, are shown below. When more data is available at the level of Swaledale then these charts will be updated. Similar plots can be generated on the British Trust for Ornithology website birdtrends pages1.
Marske is lucky to have healthy populations of native amphibians including frogs, common toads, and palmate newts. Toads congregate at their breeding ponds in March and April every year, many migrating big distances across fields and down hillsides to reach their ancestral ponds. Unfortunately two of the main toad breeding ponds around Marske are close to roads, and hundreds are killed on roads every year. The parish council now sets up toad warning signs for motorists on Skelton Lane during the breeding season but if you drive near Marske during spring, please go slowly near the ponds between Marske and Clapgate!
Slow-worms are regularly seen in and around Marske in the summer months, especially during their courtship season in May. They particularly favour south-facing slopes, old retaining dry-stone walls and other undisturbed rocky places with crevices. They eat small slugs and other invertebrates, and if you are a gardener, they are your friend! They are actually neither worms nor snakes but legless lizards and apparently the remains of their legs can be seen on x-rays of their skeletons. Nor are they particularly slow: if you accidentally surprise one, it doesn’t half move. If you look closely, you can see that they have eyelids and forked tongues. They hibernate from late October to April in holes in the ground. Unusually for reptiles, they give birth to live young in September. If you drive a car in the area around Marske, go carefully, as slow-worms are often killed on roads.
Marske is a very wooded place. The limestone scars (see geology) all around are home to home to isolated ancient yew trees, which are hundreds of years old, and may be relics of the immediate post-glacial landscape. The steep land along the limestone edges is generally covered in deciduous woods (or in some places productive forestry), and in fields there are a great many old oaks and sycamores that were probably planted as parkland trees in the 19th century or before. In the village, the grounds of Marske Hall have many beautiful specimen trees. It is interesting that wherever there are limestone cliffs, there are gnarly old yew trees which it’s thought could be post-glacial relics, perhaps the oldest living things in the area2. Scattered around the Marske Beck valley are many long-dead remains of English Elm, but interestingly there are plenty of living Wych Elms in hedgerows and woods. The survival of Wych Elms is important because there is a population of White-letter Hairstreak butterflies in the valley – a butterfly that is dependent on elm trees for its existence.
The grounds of Marske Hall were planted with a range of ornamental and exotic trees in the nineteenth century and includes some specimens of redwood, cedar, and yew.