A disused chalk quarry in the Yorkshire Wolds is home to Wharram Quarry nature reserve

“IT’S behind you, Nigel!” calls Caroline Comins. The photographer freezes; then crouches in the tangle of wild flowers and grasses that cover the floor of the quarry.

He turns, and there it is: a large peacock butterfly, sunning itself on a grass stem, its wings fanning gently.

On a good day, Wharram Quarry can be a paradise for butterflies. Today it is overcast and we haven’t seen many. It has, anyway, been a rubbish year for butterflies, says Caroline, the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s regional reserves manager. Because of the poor weather, many never even hatched, she says.

The peacock puts on a fine display for us, however. And the floor of the quarry itself is stunning: a riot of textures and shapes and colours.

This is chalk grassland: but ‘grassland’ hardly does it justice. It’s when you stoop down and really look into the grasses that you start to notice.

There are myriad wildflower species here: rare autumn gentian, with beautiful purple flowers on fleshy green stems; eyebright, with its frostings of tiny white flowers that gleam in the hazy sunshine; yellow bird’s-foot trefoil; field bindweed, a kind of wild convolvulus with trumpet-shaped flowers of subtle pink and white; and woolly thistle, just past its best now, but some specimens still topped with rich purple flowers, the tangle of silky threads on the seed pod that give it it’s name very obvious at this time of year.

There’s common knapweed, another purple-headed member of the thistle family that comes without prickles; and a fine, almost ferny little plant known as ladies’ bedstraw.

“It used to be used for stuffing mattresses for ladies because of its sweet smell, apparently,” says Caroline, picking a sprig and sniffing.

Rest harrow, a scrubby little herb with beautiful pink pea-like flowers, is so called because it grows in dense tussocks, says Caroline. “When you were ploughing, you would get your harrow caught up in it.”

Quaking grass is a lovely, fine grass with a frail seed head on which individual seed pods sit like tiny bells. Hold a stem in your hand and those seed pods shake and tremble – hence the name. And then there is yellow rattle, a pretty little annual with neat yellow flowers that, at this time of year, has produced pods of seeds. Shake it, and the seeds rattle – hence the name.

Yellow rattle is partly parasitic, says Caroline. It sends out roots that grow into the roots of neighbouring plants – usually grasses – and steal nutrients from them. She points out an area of the quarry floor where yellow rattle is growing thickly.

“You can see the grass is less vigorous here,” she says. And so it is.

Ironically, that make yellow rattle a good plant to have in a wildflower meadow – it keeps the grasses in check, allowing wildflowers to grow in their place.

Another, but far less pleasant, parasitic plant that grows here at Wharram Quarry is Thistle Broomrape. It’s an ugly, flesh-coloured plant that at this time of year has withered to brown. It doesn’t need to be green because unlike other plants, it doesn’t perform photosynthesis, says Caroline: it feeds entirely off thistles, tapping into their roots to steal water and nutrients. It is a rare plant, sometimes known as the Yorkshire Broomrape, which is found only in Yorkshire – and it is to be seen here, at Wharram Quarry, its tallish brown spikes standing close to the thistles it is feeding off. Yorkshire’s very own parasitic plant. How nice.

But Wharram Quarry really is a wildflower wonderland. And it didn’t get this way by chance.

Once quarried for chalk – used for railway embankments – it is part of the Birdsall Estate but has, since the 1960s, been managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as one of its nature reserves.

The eastern edge of the reserve is an oddly-fluted chalk cliff, where the crumbly white rock was scooped out long ago. The ‘scoops’ make an excellent habitat for plants such as the rare red hemp nettle. It’s also great for birds, says Jono Leadley, the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Director of Development: yellowhammer, linnet, tree sparrow. Their song drifts across the flower meadows as we walk. “That’s a lesser whitethroat!” says Jono, as we hear a ‘chit chit chit!’ coming from the face of the cliff.

It is the quarry floor that is the most fascinating, however. It is cleverly managed by the Wildlife Trust so that the meadow flowers and grasses are at different stages of development.

Leave it alone for long enough, and eventually hawthorn would take over, then more mature woodland, such as sycamore or ash – there are two small areas of such woodland on the western edge of the reserve.

But this quarry floor is grazed twice a year by the Wildlife Trust’s herd of Hebridean sheep, to keep the hawthorn down. And every 12 years a ‘scoop’ of the quarry floor is cleared right back to bedrock, to allow new plant species to start growing. So different areas of the quarry floor are at different stages of wildflower development – increasing the diversity and richness of the reserve.

You can see how long some areas of the quarry floor have been left undisturbed by the anthills spouting there. They are mainly at the northern end of the reserve, clustered beneath the chalk cliff-face.

They feel very slightly warm to the touch – and the plants growing on them are different to those on the quarry floor itself. They include wild thyme, and a tiny little plant with a distinctly lemony smell. The reason the plants growing here are different is because the anthills drain differently to the quarry floor, Jono says.

And some of these anthills have been here for decades. Jono squats down in front of one which is a good two to three feet across.

Anthills grow each year, Jono says, as the ant colonies who have built them extend their homes. Usually they grow by the size of about a fist each year – so some of these anthills at Wharram Quarry could be 40 or 50 years old.

Fifty-year-old ant cities growing in glorious wildflower meadows in a disused chalk quarry high up on the Yorkshire Wolds: now that’s got to be worth a visit, surely?

Fact file

Wharram Quarry nature reserve is close to the village of Wharram-le-Street, which is on the B1248 Malton to Beverley road, up on the Wolds seven miles east of Malton.

At the crossroads in Wharram-le-Street follow signposts towards Birdsall. The reserve is on the left after about half a mile, with a Yorkshire Wildlife Trust sign at the only entrance.

There is very limited parking in front of the main gate, or else try to find somewhere to park carefully along the road, without obstructing traffic or gateways.

The reserve is only small – just under ten acres – but wonderfully secluded, and rich in wildflowers, insects and birds.

One of the beauties of the reserve, says Jono Leadley of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, is that it changes throughout the seasons. “You have cowslip and coltsfoot in the spring; orchids (including spotted orchids, bee orchids and pyramidal orchids) in July; and knapweed and other wildflowers at this time of year.”