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The butterfly depends on a network of marshy grassland habitat, usually grazed by cattle, with a plentiful supply of the devil's-bit scabious plant - its favourite food.

Seven years on, it is starting to look respectable, filled with fritillaries, oxeye daisies, devil’s-bit scabious, and bird’s-foot trefoil.

Small scabious mining bees can only be found in Scotland in the Cairngorms and feed exclusively on a plant known as devil's-bit scabious - so called because the roots come to an abrupt end "as if the devil had bitten them off".

By recreating the glades which once existed in dense forest cover, they provide home for up to 120 flowering species, among them the devil's-bit scabious, globeflower, great burnet, lady's-mantle, oxeye daisy, pignut and wood crane's-bill.

I asked one farmer the name of a brilliant autumnal flower whose intense purple was then unfamiliar to me—the Devil's-bit.