It’s been a very busy summer so far for me of working and commuting. I had a free afternoon and so headed to my local dreamspace, but with no mushrooms on the mind – literally or figuratively.
Red admiral (phone pic)
The number of butterflies was remarkable, perhaps the sense of doom about 2023’s poor invertebrate spring had dampened my expectations too much. There were red admirals, skippers, whites of course, and even a white admiral on the sandy track. White admiral is something I don’t see that often, mainly because I lived in London for so long. Then again, it is cropping up in SE London now, which is interesting.
I was enjoying the sense of a butterfly summer, when I nearly spilled my invisible coffee at the sight of a deep red mushroom on the edge of the track.
Mushrooms, so abrupt, unapologetic. They know how welcome they are, even if you don’t realise it yourself at the time.
This was one of the summery, colourful boletes that can be found at this time of year. It’s probably a neoboletus, but my iNaturalist record is without community input and I haven’t had the time to do any research myself. So it remains an unknown jewel.
A few paces away was a more common and typical summer shroom, what I would guess is a blusher.
This short walk on the edge of the High Weald was notable for its green-ness, surely close to peaking as August nears.
We’re lucky over here that we aren’t experiencing the mega burns and record high temperatures of Greece, Italy and Arizona. You have to wonder how some of our fungi will cope with the drought and the impact on our woods. No doubt fungi will outlive humans in the long, long run (they can survive and thrive in nuclear reactors) but the heat can’t be good for the health of our woods which may struggle to adapt to pace and intensity of change.
When are we going to see serious action on climate, rather than flip-flopping by both major political parties? The kind of urgency we saw in crisis-managing COVID-19? Am I destined to see meaningful environmental policy remain as a marginal ideal in my lifetime?
No doubt fungi will rise into conservation thinking beyond the obsession with bringing back questionable, extinct species. But will that be too late as the heat rises and the woods burn?
Fungi, ever-resilient, have been found to benefit from burning in Australia, but of course that is just a handful of species.
It would be foolish no to follow one of the key messages fungi can teach us: don’t forget the present, you never know what might pop up.
In April 2023 I visited Achill Island in County Mayo for the first time in 10 years.
I have happy memories of a visit to Achill in March 2013 with my parents. Returning with my mum in April after the passing of my dad in 2021, we followed the same route as a decade ago, stopping at Cloughmore to see the Atlantic’s wild waves crashing against the rocks. It brought back strong memories of that last visit a decade earlier, and thoughts of dad heading out onto similar rock formations to fish, further south in Cork during 1990s summer holidays.
In the surrounding sheep-cropped grasslands pipits, likely the rock variety, skipped and flew between boulders. A man cast a drone along the coastal edge before packing his kit (and three generations of his family) into the car and went off again.
I walked around looking for lichens to add to my iNaturalist map and picked off two small pieces of quartz that came away with ease.
The power of the waves, the overwhelming sound of the sea – the hiss and crash – and the sheer beauty of the view north along the coastline silenced me. See for yourself.
If you were to head directly west from here by sea, you would arrive in Newfoundland or Labrador in eastern Canada. My relatives made similar journeys, some of them never came home but instead built lives of their own in New York City. Some were of Irish heritage and were born in America, but returned to Ireland.
I recently read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. I’ve been on an Irish fiction streak, in some ways to try and understand the experiences of my Irish relatives, who made the same crossings and who also built lives in Brooklyn before the book’s setting of 1950. Other than Toibin I’ve read most of the Donal Ryan novels, where migration is again a key theme.
Eileen, my great-great auntEva, my long-lost great grandmother
Two of my relatives who went to America are my long-lost great-grandmother Eva Sugrue (right), and her sister Eileen (left). My family have confirmed Eileen was married in the same Brooklyn courthouse that progressed one of the many cases against ex-President Donald Trump, which is nice. No one in my family today, or even my grandmother, knew Eva (her mother) or Eileen. That mystery trickles down, and it was only through the diligence and commitment of my family’s desire to find out more that the photos above ever came to light.
On our way off of Achill we stopped at a craft shop. I wanted to buy some proper knitwear (oh yes) and a few gifts for home. We got talking to a woman called Kathleen who was running the shop. She had lived in London, Littlehampton, and Winchester, the latter when her husband was working on the creation of the M3 cutting through the South Downs at Twyford. They had lived in a caravan park while the work was being undertaken, a community of Irish families cropping up with all the workers there to do the job.
In talking we covered all the major issues: English nationalism, Brexit, Trump, Putin. She had a way of saying, ‘I don’t care either way, but…’. We also discussed the ‘shock’ of living in rural West Sussex compared to most other places, how beautiful the South Downs were.
Kathleen was readying herself for the influx of American tourists expected in line with a visit from US President Joe Biden, ‘a Mayo man’, as the whole world now knows. She asked if we would be staying around for Biden’s visit, but we were already planning to leave for Dublin before his arrival. The payment machine didn’t work as the signal was so poor, and she felt embarrassed that she’d have to ask the Americans to pay in cash.
Achill has a long history of people coming and going as Biden’s family did, though particularly to England, as the video above shows.
In June I spent some time at the Weald & Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex. I was trying out a new wide-angle lens and in the perfect place to do so. I focused on Poplar Cottage, one of the most attractive ‘installations’ at the museum. Below are some images and also the italicised text which is written in the cottage’s binder, and therefore copyright Weald & Downland Living Museum.
Poplar Cottage was originally built on a small plot of common land on the edge of Washington Common in West Sussex. It is a building of a distinctive type with a hipped roof at one end and a gabled roof at the other. The gabled end originally contained a smoke bay.
Washington is a village at the foot of the South Downs in West Sussex, near Chanctonbury Ring. Its name relates to “Wassa’s people” rather than a place renowned for cleaning.
This cottage type is associated with ‘wasteland’ or ‘wayside’ encroachment onto common land. The earliest occupants of the cottage are likely to have been husbandmen or rural craftsmen. Husbandmen were socially inferior to yeomen but superior to labourers.
Many cottagers engaged in small-scale craft activities, like making wooden hoops for barrels or spars for thatching, or indeed shoe-making. We have evidence to suggest that a shoe-maker may have lived here in the 17th century.
It was a bright, humid morning as we set out for Helvellyn. On the winding track towards Red Tarn, we met a man, perhaps in his 70s, who was completing a ‘recovery run’ by trekking deep into the hills. I laboured behind him, kind of in awe, as he split off from the main trail, having extolled on us the dynamism of the landscape, its rich industrial past. He loved it, he said, before disappearing into the valley, off the track.
The trail was busy, with a variety of northern accents carried on the wind below the peak of Catstye Cam. Best of all perhaps was the Geordie-lilt of a group of women working their way up the hill. The Lakes are the northerner’s South Downs, their Sunday playground. Unlike these folks from the north-east, I have to admit I found the humidity stifling.
We rounded the hill and met the steep-sided bowl of Helvellyn, Red Tarn glimmering at its base. Here we encountered one of the strange tiers of mountain or hillwalking, where new ranges appear, delivering you from previous zones within the landscape. Your psychological experience can be altered completely. I have vivid memories of walks in mountains in the past 10 years when these changes took place, whole new valleys appearing from beyond the horizon. It makes it all worth it.
My companion, Pete, spied ravens and lesser black-backed gulls. He’s a ‘top birder’ and professional conservationist of serious skill and knowledge. Having not spent much time with him in recent years due to the pandemic and the birth of his first son, I had forgotten just how much he has taught me over the years, and how being in his company sharpens your own senses.
‘Clever,’ Pete said of the lesser black-backed gull. ‘Going where the food is’, as in any leftovers from the large groups of walkers high on the summit.
In the distance we saw perhaps 50-100 people on a group walk cutting up a desireline on the hillside, in order to meet the famous Striding Edge from down by Red Tarn. On other days we saw families traipsing up from Glenridding as they sought highlines across the ridge towards Striding Edge.
We opted for the ‘gentler’, shorter route of Swirral Edge. We had to wait for some time as others scrambled down the sharp, jutting slabs of rock, often on their backsides! I was glad to be ascending, only looking into the rocks rather than down into sheer drops. When I did turn to look over my shoulder, the view contained the sublime vista of Ullswater.
Reaching the summit was like accepting an invitation to a special alpine (maybe not quite ‘alpine’ in official terms) community. Two dogs tried to eat my lunch (of course). Those ravens we had seen earlier toed the edge of the escarpment, one hopping sideways along with the wind. We sat there and took it all in.
After a break, we made our way north along the ridge passing up and down over several small hills, with Thirlmere in the west. Down into the valley we had first climbed from, we could see the grey structure of a dam, something the recovery runner had identified to us as being related to the Greenside Mine. One of the dams in the area burst in the 1800s, causing huge damage downstream.
We encountered the unusual sight of two men hiking together in different Manchester football shirts – one in the deep red of United, the other, a hint of a grin on his face, in the baby blue of City. Rivalries die in these hills.
At Sticks Cross we turned east and found ourselves in a far wilder and more ecologically rich valley. The path edged the slopes of Sticks Gill, flowing down towards Glenridding. Here we had entered the margins of National Trust land, where the hills were touched by heather and bog.
The yellow of bog asphodel was smattered among the heather.
In small boggy patches the red rackets of round-leaved sundew could be found among sphagnum moss. Here we were haunted by a small fritillary butterfly that never waited long enough for a photo or closer viewing. Bees flew in numbers unseen near Helvellyn.
This rich landscape began to break away as the scars of the mining industry, once of global significance but now over 60 years in the past, appeared. The lunar expanse was testament to the long history of lead mining in this area, explored as far back as perhaps Queen Elizabeth I, according to the information boards in the youth hostel.
Taking paths cut through the spoil and rubble, there came a wonderful zigzag of crouched woodland. Juniper trees, some potentially of veteran status, covered the steep hillside as it fell away to the epicentre of the mining industry, now marked by the youth hostel and other accommodation. Some of these houses had been newly renovated with estate agent signs noted some as sold. As we sat in the YHA after this walk, a man came in asking for more information about who had bought the houses. It reminded me just how invested people are in this place, the YHA included, which I was only visiting for the first time.
High on that juniper ridge, aspens and pines grew, while foxgloves dropped their socks towards seed as their season closed. Pete had said how he wanted to see an emperor moth and he got lucky when he found a large green caterpillar moving among ballast at the path edge. We confirmed it via a combo of iNaturalist and messaging my mother-in-law!
In the end it was a walk of around 8 miles, but it felt like much more due to the climbs. All worth it – the rewards were immense. Dear Lake District National Park – I’m sold.
I’ve been trying to keep my macro photos rolling in the absence of June’s one pic each day. It’s a bit like keeping your lawn growing after No Mow May.
Actually, no, it’s harder because you have to be proactive.
By far the best encounter with the macro world this past week was a patch of hogweed along a footpath by the local river. A cyclist went past me as I was taking these photos – even though it was a footpath – and glared at me as if I was doing something truly evil or dangerous to the public.
I have a bike, too, so if that exercised the cycling community, we’re all friends here on djg.com…
Hogweed is a weird plant, in that it’s part of a family that both kills, but also provides edible plant matter. Its sap is photocorrosive (not as bad as its big brother, giant hogweed) but its flowers are very, very good for pollinators. It can also be a bit invasive because it burgeons in places where nitrogen levels are artificially high (probably dog urine here…) therefore most of England.
A marmalade hoverfly feeding on the hogweed stamens
A soldier beetle also drinking from the carrot fountain
I would say this was maybe an ashy mining bee, but a little faded and low on the ‘ashy’ body hair
Earlier this week I noticed an ichneumon wasp exploring the raspberry patch in my garden. It was pausing to use its ovipositor on the curled up leaf – presumably the work of some other organism creating a sort of cocoon. I love them!
Unlocking Landscapes 