Its character may be negative, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or positive as the Creator of the world in Alaskan fables. Nearer to home, the Scandinavian invaders of Britain used its image as an emblem of power. Odin used two ravens, named Thought and Memory, to fly the world each day in order to inform him of what was happening. Walking in real life down the steep and wet slope I was finding the concentration on every step very tedious. The first objects to catch my eye were bird pellets in a heap on a ledge.
Ravens are pellet-producing birds, as are the hawks and the owls.
Whichever bird was responsible for these had sat on a rock projection above, identifiable by the white streams on the surfaces below. Most pellets contained fur and a few fragments of iridescent blue beetle. One, however, was similar to other recent ones that I had seen scattered on the hillside. The beetle in question is the rather attractive scarab-shaped dung beetle of the fells. In the first field below the hillside a flock of about 50 goldfinches was feeding on the seed heads of various dandelion-relatives.