Many of our weeds of cultivation tend to be low growing, sprawling and often quite small. I guess this enabled them to survive during harvesting when this was done in traditional ways, that is with manual labour rather than the extensive mechanisation now employed. Field madder is a species that fits this description well.
Field madder is a member of the bedstraw family and has the clusters of four petalled flowers that are typical of this group of plants. It also has a square stem that is covered in small hairs. The flower is usually mauve although my photograph may give the idea that they are blue. In some places this is actually known as blue field madder.
Like so many agricultural weeds this little plant is far less common than it once was but it can still be found in places where the soil is bare, especially in areas where the soil is calcareous. The car park at Durlston Country Park has a number of plants growing in the gutters so it is obviously able to survive where the soil is thin.
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