"Hello my name is Iain Stafford. I'm Bolsover Countryside Partnership ranger, working for Derbyshire County Council. From here it's the beginning of the Five Pits Trail. The trail carries on northward now going through Tibshelf, Pilsley and finishes up at Holmewood and Grassmoor Country Park. The site we are now at is the former site of the colliery workings.
"The very short sward you can see adjacent to the trail is very good for orchids. You'll often see common spotted her, as well as bee orchids, we get quite a few bee orchids alongside the trail, very small delicate flower, that doesn't like a lot of competition with a lot of grass species. The bee orchid actually mimics a species of bee we don't actually get in this country. But it fools a lot of other bee species that come up, and the male bee thinks it's a female bee and wishes to mate with. But the plants can self-pollinate themselves. So if they don't get visited by insects, then they can continue on.
"They have quite a long life span, it may be up to 7 years, when the seed actually hits the ground before you get the first flower. The plant keeps on flowering each year if the nutrients and the conditions are right, or it may decide it's not going to flower again, for the next 2 or 3 years. So you do a count one year and you've got a lot of bee orchids there. You come back next year and you think you've done something wrong, because there are no orchids left. But the year later, they all come back again. They are all still there, but it's got to be the right conditions to flower."