Country Diary: This moorland needed rain – it got something even better | Ed Douglas

Can the landscape breathe a sigh of relief? That’s exactly how I felt as I made my way through the blueberries and lingonberries, hung with pearls of the night rain that soaked my shins.

Along the trail, the dry, dusty soil turned back to soothing dirt. At one point I was thrilled to have carefully skirted the puddle. A buzzard circled overhead, and a small flock of swallows glided through the heather, the purple color of which was already fading, it seemed to me, too soon. To the west there was a kestrel along the slopes of Wet Whitens.

The curve of the moor here becomes steeper as it descends towards Highlaw Brook, but before this there is a bench, a flat space that was used as a burial mound in the Bronze Age. Next to it is a hedge with a circle of small stones, the most prominent of which was once nicknamed “the chair”.

I noticed that a predator, possibly a kestrel nearby, had recently been dismantling something small and furry on a chair, so I quickly moved towards the mound.

The view from here is one of the best I know – evidence that our distant ancestors had a wonderful sense of landscape. In the distance I could see the spire of St Michael’s Cathedral in Hathersage, its position no less harmonious: nestled in the curve of the hills opposite, the ridge lines intersecting like arms on shoulders.

The mound itself is a pile of stones that was torn apart in the mid-18th century when a nearby highway was built and workers came in search of material. This was decades before the communities were taken over by acts of enclosure, in this case by the Duke of Devonshire. Later, in the 19th century, he turned it into a grouse swamp.

These winding threads of deep history show just how diverse our Highlands were, from sacred space to sheep track to elite playground. Now this place has a new history. An anonymous benefactor has donated Eyam Moor to Derbyshire Wildlife Trust as a refuge for biodiversity, a glimmer of light in a troubled sky.