Tag: East Sussex

Going to Battle (the village)

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Not that kind of battle, but instead to the village in East Sussex. Battle the village is the site of one of the major battles of the Norman Conquest of England of 1066, when the Normans invaded Britain and defeated the Anglo-Saxons.

It’s a period in history that absolutely fascinates me. The land ownership brought about by the Normans has shaped much of the rural landscape today, bar the impact of the enclosures in the 18th-19th centuries.

I was passing through from Rye in February 2025 and wanted to experience Battle (the village), so we stopped off for some food and a walk around. The main photographic interest was in the timber-framed buildings. It’s always worth checking out old Sussex villages because they are so rich in history and much of it is well preserved.

The timber-framers are concentrated along the rather loud high street, noisy because it’s the main road and has a fair amount of agricultural traffic.

22 High Street dates to the 1400s!

Now squeezed in by the George Hotel, it’s home to a charity shop raising money to support homeless people.

I know it says 1500, but it goes deeper than that.

I enjoyed this little alley view, but I’m not sure if it’s too wide to be a twitten.

If you came here looking for food, tough luck – the kitchen was demolished in 1685. I’m confused by the date as the Historic England listing only dates it to 1688. What happened to the kitchen!?

This is the imaginatively named 59 & 60 High Street. It’s been restored but dated to the 1400s. Just goes to show how old Battle High Street is.

Before turning off the main road onto Mount Street, I enjoyed the ‘clap-boarding’ on this little shop. This is a technique used to protect the front of a house from rain and wind, hence its other name of ‘weather-boarding’.

This is a decorative hanging-tile style that you often see in Kent and Sussex. The tiles are ‘hung’ on two pegs from holes in the top corners of the tile and laid one by one over each other. It was introduced to protect timbers from rot and weathering, I think. This one doesn’t have a listing but is probably 1700s.

Now we’re talking. This large house, Lewins Croft, is the wonkiest of the wonkies.

It’s a joy, but a shame it’s so close to the road.

It’s also very old, dating to the 1500s.

Here’s another nice clap-boarded cottage along Mount Street, off the main road.

Thanks for reading.

Oak timbers

Damselflies at Sheffield Park 🐉

Daniel Greenwood4 Comments

For my mum’s birthday in early August, we visited Sheffield Park in East Sussex, just over the border from West Sussex. It’s a National Trust estate so membership is needed to avoid the £17 entrance fee.

I didn’t have a camera with me other than my phone, but the Pixel 7a has an amazing camera, so I managed some nice pics of a few damselflies.

Obviously these are people not dragonflies, but the area was absolutely zinging with Odonata (the scientific name for dragons and damsels). This is looking back towards where the estate house is, though it’s not somewhere you can enter. People live there like in olden times.

Perched on the edge of the giant rhubarb (Gunnera – a super invasive wetland plant installed in places like Sheffield Park long ago for their showy foliage) was a small red-eyed damselfly.

What a beauty. Damselflies generally rest with closed wings, while dragonflies have them open. That notion was quickly dispelled by my next sighting. Usually dragons are much bigger anyway, by the way.

I was chatting to my sister when I noticed a damsel had taken a very pleasing perch in a shrub. A damselfly holding its wings out!

Now this is a willow emerald damsel, a species which ten years ago people were losing their minds over. It was a new arrival in the UK, and likely indicative of a warming climate. Now they are everywhere in southern England, and we’re experiencing temperature breakthroughs year on year.

I was just pleased to share a nice day in Sussex with my nearest and dearest. You can’t ask for much more than that, except for maybe some beautiful damselflies.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

The lackey in the Cuckmere valley 🐛

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

I was out and about in the Cuckmere Valley in May and had the chance to learn a little bit about some of the species found there. Here’s a small selection of images, a blend of phone pics and some from my camera.

Once again I was treated to the sight of early spider orchids, a plant I blogged about only recently. This was a big surprise, having spent a lot of time looking for them elsewhere. This is a nationally rare plant and I won’t be giving away its location. I did get the chance to learn that the flower mimics the scent of the buffish mining bee. The male bee is lured in and attempts to mate with the flower, thereby pollinating it. In the photo above you can see the pollen grains that have been helpfully, accidentally, applied by the visiting bee.

The mining bees live in the nearest exposed areas of chalk where they drill their burrows. It’s a short commute to their deceptive orchid neighbours.

The blackthorn hedges were holding populations of moth caterpillars that cover the branches in webs of silk. This is the kind of thing that pops up in local newspapers as some kind of wild clickbait. The moth is known as the lackey in English. What the significance of that name (or any of the number of weird moth names) is unclear to me.

We found this proto-Mesolithic (Stone Age) scene, with a discarded King Alfred’s cakes fungus. The fungus had probably been used to maintain the fire of one or more disposable barbecues. The stones were littered across the scorched earth like the throwaways of some prehistoric stone mason.

On the banks of the Cuckmere’s static meanders are ranks of hoary cress. At first I thought they looked like a type of sedum but in fact they’re in the cabbage family. This is an introduced species.

A view back up the Cuckmere meanders, at very low levels for the time of year. Two little egrets can be seen here.

Thanks for reading.

More macro (my tags/categories seem to be broken at the moment – will try and fix them!)

The South Downs

#FungiFriday: witches’ butter? Of gorse, it is.

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Due to Christmas hols I’m a couple of days late to Fungi Friday on my blog, morphing instead to Mushroom Monday!

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time at Lullington Heath in the South Downs National Park. Lullington Heath is a National Nature Reserve with the super rare habitat chalk heath. It had lots of little waxcaps fruiting at the time.

As you can see Lullington Heath is dominated by gorse which affects the diversity of plants and fungi that can prosper there.

The gorse forms a scrubby woodland and provides ample habitat for one of the most striking species of fungus: yellow brain. It’s also known as witches’ butter, a lovely colloquial name that hints at the role fungi has in British folklore.

This is the yellow brain from the pics above. I cut it out before it was cleared and brought it into the sun. I hid it further away in the gorse afterwards.

It’s actually parasitic on crust fungi which you can see on the right hand side here.

Keep an eye out for my fungal year 2019, an account of things I found and photographed this year, which I’ll be hoping to post in January.

Merry Christmas to all the funguys and gals out there!

More mushrooms