It's the pits!

We don't have wonderful beaches and mountains to photograph here in Cambridge so please accept these humble offerings! I could not decide between the mono shot which, to my eye, offers a slightly better sense of perspective and scale and the one in colour.

This chalk quarry once provided hard chalk to build Cambridge University colleges and lime for cement. Today it supports a variety of habitats that harbour some rare plants and insects.  A pair of Peregrine Falcons have bred here for a number of years.  It was worked up until the early 1980s. Standing within the pit, you are surrounded by steep cliffs of chalk that glow in the late afternoon sun so I'll have to go back again for another blip!.

 Reprofiling the base of the pit in 2009 broke up much of the solid chalk surface, which enabled wildflowers and grasses to spread and colonise the exposed chalk. Apparently, wildflowers such as milkwort, harebell and kidney vetch are thriving. The rare moon carrot only grows here and at two other locations in the country (Beachy Head, East Sussex and Knocking Hoe, Bedfordshire). Annual monitoring shows that the number of moon carrot plants here is increasing.