I WAS fortunate to have a holiday this summer that afforded me a couple of days walking in the French Alps.

I was also fortunate that it was an opportunity to escape the dreadfully dreary rainy days we seem to have had all too many of this summer.

The scenery of the Alps is wonderfully dramatic, towering rocky crags; the tallest topped in shimmering white snow, with lush green alpine pastures cascading away from them into the picturesque villages that line the valley floors. You may well think that this majestic environment would be a complete contrast to what we find here in the Wyre Forest district but what shocked me was the startling similarities with, in particular, the Rifle Range and Devil’s Spittleful heathland nature reserves.

Firstly, there is the big and most obvious difference, in that any walk in the Alps is really going to be rather uphill whilst the Rifle Range in its majority is flat but the vegetation you come across is remarkably similar. If you start to ascend one of the many peaks, you will inevitably start in what is known as alpine pasture.

A lush grassland, filled with a diverse flora, some of which is unique but others very familiar like harebells, scabious and hawkweeds, all of which can be found growing on the acid grasslands of the Rifle Range. These pastures were filled with bush crickets and grasshoppers, just like the Rifle Range, but the alpine grasshoppers and bush crickets were not hunted by the spectacular hornets that you can frequently encounter out on the Range. This is probably due to the size of the alpine bush crickets, as the majority were around four to five cm in length and prepared to give you a good bite if they felt threatened. The alpine pastures were also managed the same way as the Rifle Range, with the use of cattle grazing.

As you ascend higher, you come upon alpine heath and here the landscape is remarkably similar to our local heaths. Purple flowering common heather was the dominant plant with patches of bilberry interspersed with this to give a patchwork effect. The heaths around Kidderminster are threatened from evasive shrubs like broom and silver birch, I did not encounter any birch or broom scrub invading the alpine heath but instead their heath was being threatened by the encroachment of alder trees. Bizarre! Alder is the last tree you would find on our heaths as it is much more at home in the wet woodland of the district where it is highly prized. This scrub is controlled by cattle grazing.

Once you have ascended above the alpine heath zone the similarities fade as you move into a very barren rocky environment, and whilst it is true the Rifle Range has the Devil’s Spittleful rock prominently rising out of it the wildlife it supports is just heath or woodland species that have managed to cling perilously to the rocky outcrop, whilst in the Alps this zone had some fantastic plant specialists that had evolved specifically to cope with this harsh environment.

It was certainly unexpected to encounter such familiarity in such a vastly visually different landscape but it just helped to reinforce with me just how special our heaths are.