3 orchid walk

Off today on our Boris which involved a short car journey to the start.
The gov had some recollection of an orchid rich woodland on the Essex/Cambridgeshire border not far from home, so after consulting her voluminous folder of walks to do and done we found what we suspected was the location of this horticulturally significant place.
After a few detours and missing paths we found ourselves in a wild flower meadow liberally scattered with the Pyramidal orchid above and the bee orchid in extra 1. We were very pleased with our find and continued our walk to be amazed when walking through Great Bendysh Wood to see dozens of Common Spotted orchid as seen in extra 2.
The 12km walk was a revelation in wild flowers but a sobering reflection on our extremely dry spring. We passed through literally hundreds of acres of fields of dead winter barley and oats that have been sprayed off because the crop is not worth harvesting. This sort of thing has been driven out of the news by Covid 19 but our agricultural industry is facing an awful year. Extreme wet weather in winter caused winter crop seed to rot in the fields followed by the driest spring on record meant that what did grow had no body to the grains. Add to this the lack of labour to pick and process vegetable crops and you have a very gloomy outlook for the east of the country.