Nature's victory?

The steel gates creaked open as we entered the abandoned quarry; a great tit nesting in one of the hollow gate posts flew away in alarm. Rusty machinery remained like the shell of a ship grounded on a salty sand bank, now only providing a perch for the scimitar-winged hobby, hunting for dragonflies under summer skies. We explored every corner: sandy banks riddled with the holes of solitary bees and wasps; ancient woodland with a shattered oak and iridescent blue jewel-beetles; a marsh studded with the puce-pink of marsh orchids and sheets of ragged-robin. At the end of the afternoon I sat among a bed of bird's-foot-trefoil, garishly yellow and orange, and shut my eyes. All I could hear was the sound of the red-tailed bumblebees, feeding greedily on the flowers, the insistent purring of a turtle dove and a distant farmyard cockerel, crowing out of time. No lorries, no machinery, no men shouting...The wildlife won this battle - nightingales, dormice, great crested-newts all conspired to thwart further development, but now the quarry men, who worked among the foxes and hares, only have their own small gardens to tend.