Imagine a snow storm – satin, white, ice green, Prussian blue – streaming out of the night, texture upon texture, colour upon colour. Snowflakes pelt into my face, brush my fingers, unhitching the neat lines of the everyday. But it’s the hottest night in England since records began. Normally cool on Dartmoor even in mid-summer, it feels tropical.
The moths tumble out of the sleeping meadow into the radiance of a high-wattage lamp and into the sight-lines of our perception. When I see the breadth of their diversity beneath the lamp I feel as though I had stumbled into a dragon’s-cave of gems hoarded in a mountain side. We are crouching in an ancient meadow on what feels like the edge of the known world, the highest land mass in southern England: Dartmoor. Beyond, the dark hogback of Hamel Down heaves under the red sky.
Above us bats circle – dark shapes. Cool, glimmering glass-phials of micro-moths are passed round. One is placed in my hand. Names called out. Moths bewildered as they are released back into the night. The bats dive sending out high frequency pulses; they ‘see’ the moth-shapes stream towards the light-box. The smart moths, having evolved bat-hearing-ears sixty million years ago (one hundred and forty million years after they first appeared on Earth) panic, and take defensive action, looping, diving, shivering, blurring their outlines to confuse the bats or dropping and freezing. A white ermine moth lies on its back on the shiny plastic of the moth box, claws held up. He’s dead, I say, died of shock. No, answers a moth expert, he’s pretending. A moment later the moth spins out of the circle of light.
Meanwhile, bats dash overhead, menacingly close or go silent: stealth mode. The moth-experts speak the Latin moth-names like spells, there’s the scrape of a pencil. The blizzard continues its stream into the moth boxes – one in every meadow. We draw round each one by one. Some moths seem to realise they have reached refuge and perch still. Other moths anchor themselves to empty egg-boxes placed beneath the lamp. One lands on a knee, another on a sleeve…
Why are there so many species? I ask, as a huge Elephant hawk moth, magenta and unearthly green satin pirouettes in the palm of my hand. Another with wings the colour of a summer forest leaves on my finger; another the shape of a Chinese junk sails through a glass phial; Green Arches moth, Velvet Angle Shades moth, Jersey Tiger, Brimstone, Red Chestnut Rivulet, Foxglove Pug, Flame moth, Peach Blossom. An owl screeched.
‘Because there are so many plants,’ a disembodied voice answers me. Moths evolved long tongues to suck pollen droplets on conifer cones. Eighty million years later with the evolution of flowering plants moths first reached their tongues into the calyxes of flowers. Why are there so many plants? Speciation: life evolved out of a world different from ours in a vast continuum of time.
Diverging two million years ago Pangaea split apart creating a vast array of new habitats around the shores of an encircling new sea.
One hundred and forty million years later the world we cherish today emerged. The great flowering followed: the evolution of oak trees and antelopes, bees and meadow grass. Perhaps it is true, I thought, moths show us an earlier realm that we humans never saw.
Perhaps the moths bear on their wings the contours and colours of the realms they evolved in; old rock, new veins, strata lifted and folded, emergent fresh patterns on rock face and outcrop exposing seams of minerals; gold formed in neutron‑star collisions billions of years before Earth existed, ruby tourmaline, bismuth, crystalline rose quartz, cobalt and green granite.
The clock of Buckland church struck the hour after midnight. We stumble through the red-tinged darkness, through the heat to the gate. We turn back, astonished at the sky above Widecombe. It glows rose and scarlet like a forge over Hamel Down, over Holne Ridge and Bone Hill. We feel the heat pressing down on us. Dazed I climb back into my car, take a few deep breaths, switch on the air conditioning and drive off thinking how all the world’s prizes seem nothing to what I found in the meadow.
Thank you for Devon Moth Group for the invitation to join them and to Dartmoor Preservation Association for preserving the meadows.
The highlight of my Summer 2026 at Pudsham Hay Meadows. Pudsham Blog 9 – Roz Brady, composer, writer.
Images: Simon Barron