Gatekeeper

A common butterfly at this time of year, there were dozens on the wing when I walked along a overgrown green lane this afternoon. Each pair was engaged in an aerial pas de deux - either a sparring match between males vying for territory, or an interlude of dirty dancing between male and female prior to sexual congress.

This one, at rest on its favourite bramble plant, displays, even with wings folded , the vivid 'eyes' that make birds hesitate to snap it up.

Why gatekeeper? Probably because this butterfly loves to frequent hedges and edges and marginal places like field boundaries where there are points of exit and entrance often fringed with a prickly thicket of blackberry bushes.

The word has a historic resonance in this area of Wales where keepers of the toll gates on the turnpike roads were once loathed and reviled for their tax-collecting responsibilities. Farmers and tradespeople were forced to pay heavy duties for the upkeep of the roads they had to use to get to market or to fetch and carry produce and animals and supplies in the course of their daily business. In the 1840s tollgates in South Wales were attacked and torn down by locals disguised in women's clothing: the Rebecca Rioters. Their protests caused serious problems for the authorities, who were also the landowners and landlords of the countryside.

In Welsh the word for butterfly is pili-pala, which has no relevance to the above.