Amoist airstream surging through the cold massif of the Peak District deposited ground fog over mid-Derbyshire. Just to the west, however, at the county boundary with Staffordshire, and before the world fell away to mist-enshrouded flatlands about Leek, there was a band of high country held in piercing sunlight. What little warmth fired down at this place then rebounded off the bare gritstone ridges, so that the air around the Roaches actually felt hot. Perhaps it was these conditions, in a context of otherwise absolute winter stillness, that gave rise to the day’s wildlife drama. For in the fields, and in an eddy of slow-rising warmth drifting toward the hill known as Hen Cloud, there unfolded a remarkable abundance of spiders. Initially I noticed it as strands of white wafting thread, wound around the roof edge, walls, gates and fence posts near the cafe at this spot. Then I began to feel strands of cottony stuff in my eyes. Looking down, I could see a million silvery pixels glistening in wavy lines among the fields. There were spiders everywhere: on fence tops, on stone figures in the cafe garden, on dead plants, bushes, running through my hair and across my cheek. On one post I counted 15. But the deepest insight into overall numbers came when I ran binoculars from the ground into the middle sky. The air had become a visible fluid made almost liquid by snaking, lifting lengths of silk. I’ve never seen anything like it. There must have been millions of money spiders, probably in the family Linyphiidae, dispersing in response to their high densities at source in a technique known as “ballooning”. The drag of air through the silk is greater than the weight of its maker, and the spider is carried aloft to pastures new. Who knows where it might settle? Silk strands have been recorded at elevations of 6,000m. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883 and punished the whole world with a summer of ashy skies and plunging temperatures, the first to plant a flag for life on that dead volcano was a spider on its magical silk carpet.