Tag: Photography

Stonehenge: lumps and bumps in the landscape

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

In September 2021, on the way back from a visit to Dorset, I managed what birders call a ‘life-tick’. This wasn’t a case of dropping in on a rare bird to add it to a life sightings list. No, instead it was visiting the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge for the first time in my life.

Many people in southern England will have witnessed Stonehenge’s standing stones as they crawl along the A303 in Wiltshire. But how many notice the many burial mounds?

How many people knew (maybe before they watched The Dig on Netflix) that the stones were a minuscule part of the site’s wider significance? That the site itself is a vast burial ground, with lumps and bumps (as seen above) dotted throughout this part of Salisbury Plain?

I am no expert on burial mounds, more like someone who knows a couple of garden birds when they see them. Burial mounds have different names, often they are classed as a type of earthwork or tumulus. There are bowl barrows, some of which are huge mounds of earth, built up upon the bodies and significant objects or possessions of a person or family. The South Downs have been described as one long ancient graveyard, with mounds evident across much of the 100 mile long ridge. In places like the South Downs and Salisbury Plain, the freshly turned chalk would have stood out for miles in these vast, wide open landscapes. It’s a bit like those of you with white Range Rovers or Teslas sitting on your paved-over front garden in Kensington. It’s a status symbol.

When I drive along the A303, perhaps once a year when heading south-west, I ask my fellow passenger(s) to play spot-the-burial-mound in the surrounding fields while I focus on the road. Stonehenge itself is not only special for its stones, it’s about the wider expanse, either side of the A303.

This place is important to many people, even beyond the tourists like me passing through the turnstiles at the new visitor centre. Along a lane that cuts across the A303, people had camped in mini-buses with flags flying high.

I don’t know why they were there, but the scale of the transport shows it wasn’t a stop of for a quick cup of tea.

One thing I loved about the stones was the life that had developed on them. Here you can see the growths of lichen and smatterings of algae.

Far more entertaining and animated than the lichens were the flocks of starlings sheltering from the gusts of wind (although it was actually quite hot) in the crevices of the stones.

Their behaviour was autumnal, gathering into groups, whistling and clicking. They will have been in this place when the stones were constructed thousands of years ago. Their numbers must have been incredible.

In addition to the starlings were rooks, a crow of ploughed land with a bill that looks to have been dipped in chalk. They will no doubt have found things to scavenge from the millions of visitors who make it to Stonehenge every year. The rook seen here was perched where a stone once was, with the tenon-type part of the rock used to secure the top stones in place when originally constructed.

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Early spring at Petworth Park

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A series of photos from a sunny late winter/early spring afternoon in Petworth Park. Though it’s located in the South Downs National Park, it’s a Wealden landscape of huge ancient oak and sweet chestnut trees. The views of the South Downs from Petworth are heavenly.

The oaks and chestnuts seen here are very old. The wider landscape contains some of the oldest oaks in Britain.

Photos taken with an Olympus E-M5 MIII + 12-45mm f4 lens, lightly enhanced in Adobe Lightroom.

Solidarity with the people of Ukraine 🇺🇦

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The Sussex Weald

Fungi 🍄: Storm Eunice picks her stick of the week

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

This was the week when fungi made a comeback in the form of windblown sticks.

I used to do post-storm checks in an oak woodland. It was a really enjoyable task, which may come as a surprise to hear. One benefit of all the damage to trees was seeing what previously was only seen by birds and squirrels in the canopy. By this I mean lichens and other fungi attached to windblown wood.

The West Sussex Weald after the storm

We’ve just had one of the worst storms in thirty years hit the UK, with the first-ever red warning for parts of SE England and the strongest gust on record at the Isle of Wight – 122mph. It has long been predicted that climate change would create more intense weather and the scientists are being proven right. This is at the same time that some of the more reactionary British MPs are seeking to use Brexit tactics to attack plans to protect people from the climate crisis.

A tree blocking the path at National Trust Nymans

From my experience, one of the big ‘losers’ in stormy weather in SE England is the beech tree (Fagus sylvatica). Beech is a ‘poor compartmentaliser’, meaning it isn’t particularly good at preventing fungal decay or rot from spreading to other parts of its anatomy. Oak is better evolved to deal with this.

This was a thought I had on Friday (18th February) as the winds whipped up around outside. I thought of all the beech trees in the Sussex Weald and Downs, exposed on their respective ridges, and how vulnerable they can be.

On Sunday, a visit to the National Trust’s Nymans (so woke, bro) revealed a beech to have suffered. Nymans sits on an exposed ridge, with fantastic views across the Weald (to the Ouse viaduct) and the South Downs. One path was closed and in the distance a beech tree had fallen across it. Taking a detour round and looking at the damage, there was clear evidence that it wasn’t just the storm that was to blame – fungal decay had softened the tree up.

At some point earlier in the tree’s life, decay had entered the tree’s core, leaving it open to this kind of collapse. I’ve posted about something similar previously:

#FungiFriday: fungi giveth and they taketh away
It’s a natural part of life on earth but causes problems for more controlled environments where people want to walk under trees and where they perform vital services as ‘green infrastructure’ among the grey. People who work in insurance will be very busy for the next few weeks assessing the damage that the storm, combined with fungal decay in trees, has caused.
A windblown magnolia tree – spot the mushroom in the background

Also at Nymans, a magnolia tree (which I mistook for an ash until I checked the buds) had succumbed. The roots had snapped and the tree had fallen across a path.

As you can see from this photo, the fungal decay was dominant in the tree’s core. This is probably about 30-40% of the tree’s inner wood close to the roots. The decay had spread to the roots, which is probably what caused them to fail. Tension, which holds the tree up, is lost when the roots give way and thus the tree falls.

This is where the treasure is found. When the branches that were once high up meet the ground, interesting lichens and fungi can be seen for the first time.

At Nymans there were plenty of little sticks with beautiful lichens on show (you may be able to tell these are phone pics). You can look at #StickOfTheDay or #StickOfTheWeek on Twitter if you want to see more of these.

My best find of this kind was a piece of decaying oak wood that I spotted the night before. I saw in the dark this glowing thing under a hedge, underneath an oak tree I knew was in decline. I picked them up and stored them away to be photographed the following day.

This was a stunning collection of foliose (leafy) lichens and a species of Trametes fungus, likely to be turkey tail. It perfectly illustrates the importance of decaying wood in trees, whereby the ‘dying’ wood becomes a source of nutrition and, indeed, a home for the fungi and lichens. Deadwood (saproxylic) insects will be inside the wood helping to break the wood down further. It’s what woodlands across Europe are losing due to the ‘coniferisation’ of plantations and the lack of space to allow woodlands to do their thing. Storms included.

The photo above took off when I posted it on Twitter. So much so that it made its way into the strange world of Weed/Marijuana-Gaming Twitter. Sorry to disappoint those in that netherworld, but I hadn’t even considered that someone might “smoke it” until I saw those replies.

Thanks for reading.

More mushrooms

The Weald: misty views from Leith Hill

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

Leith Hill, Surrey, January 2022

When you talk about the highest point in south-east England, I wonder what people living far away must think. We’re not talking great peaks here, but instead a stone tower on a modest 313m-high hill. And this tower of course sells tea.

I’m referring here to Leith Hill, a hilltop managed by the National Trust. Leith Hill has stood out to me over the past two years, most tantalisingly during lockdowns when I could see it from the furthest I could legally walk from my house in the most extreme lockdown times.

The tower is built from sandstone that was probably quarried nearby. This stone, if it is said material, is often a sign locally of wealth and status, when local materials indicated as much. This part of the world is geologically rich, with the landscape having so many stories to tell about the Earth and deep time.

“This tower together with 5 acres of land was presented to The National Trust for places of historic interest or natural beauty by W.T(?) MacAndrew Esq. of Reigate on 5th October 1923 to be held for the public”

Leith Hill sits on the Greensand, distinct from the Weald Clay to the south and the chalk of the North Downs seen here in the distance looking north towards London.

Leith Hill seen from the Sussex Weald (looking north) in May 2020 when England was under strict lockdown

Throughout the lockdowns I would see this distant hill from where I lived in Sussex. Though I hadn’t seen them for several months, I knew that my family were locked down on the other side in London. It was a strange comfort. My dad would sometimes send a photo of the North Downs that he could see far in the distance on clear days. Even when kept apart the landscape seemed to connect us.

When visiting Leith Hill and looking to the south, there were misty views of the Surrey and Sussex Weald. Millions of years ago this would not have been visible, with everything instead being covered by a dome of chalk that connected as far as NW France. This is the land bridge that megafauna like wolves, bears and mammoths would have used to enter what we now call Britain. Don’t tell the Priti Patel.

The chalk was eroded over millions of years and exposed the Weald Clay, which soon was covered by wildwood. That woodland lingers today in more formal oak, hornbeam and hazel woods that are now managed as coppices or nature reserves. Beyond the picnicking couple (above) you can see Leith Hill Place, originally built in 1600.

There is a unique pine tree up on the hill, a survivor from some of the first trees to arrive in this landscape after the last glacial period some 14,000 years ago. Though there was probably a more Anglicised pine species, the Scots pine is the only UK variety remaining. It thrives in this heathy landscape of the Greensand Hills.

Thanks for reading.

The Weald

The Sussex Weald: the little chimney bird

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

The other morning I was heading downstairs to do the annual Big Garden Birdwatch. This annual event is one I’ve been partaking in since 2011 when my interest in birdwatching got real.

I opened the curtains as I do each day (obviously?) and saw a lovely sunny winter’s morning out there. The street was filled with sunshine and, down by the tyre of a parked car, I noticed a small grey bird basking in the sun.

Sparrow, I thought.

As the seconds passed I thought of how usually there are more of them together, usually they make noise. Their markings are different, too.

A dunnock, then, I thought.

But then it flew up onto a wall and I picked up my binoculars. It was neither of those birds.

The other day I had been visiting a churchyard in the Sussex Weald when I noticed another sparrow-like bird perched in an unusual place – on the corner of one of the lower roofs. When travelling in France, Germany, Spain and Czechia, I had become used to seeing a little bird in this spot. It was then that I realised what the bird in the churchyard and, subsequently, the street was.

Black redstart.

A male black redstart in an old Czech town

This is bird very close to a robin in appearance but they are rare in Britain. In winter they spend time here if pushed across to Plague/Brexit Island by extreme cold weather. On the continent, robins are more scarce, a role-reversal of sorts and they spend more of their time in woodlands, rather than gardens or parks in towns. This is thought to be because robins established themselves in Britain before black redstarts could get a foothold after the end of the last glacial period some 14,000 years ago. I can’t back that theory up here unfortunately.

A male black redstart in Mikulov, Czechia

In Czechia the name for black redstart is a beautiful one: rehek domácí. They are known as ‘little chimney men’, as my friend translated it, because they appear covered in soot and they spend their time on chimneys. I don’t think we have bird names in the English language that can match that.

The ‘start’ refers to the tail of the bird, an old English word in the way that ‘shank’ means leg (rather than its more grisly modern meaning). Its tail is indeed red.

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The Sussex Weald

The Sussex Weald: Pulborrrough Brooks 🥶

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

I spent a frosty olde morning at the foot of the South Downs where the Sussex Weald dissolves into the wetlands of the Arun Valley. I’m no early riser, so these experiences of frosty landscapes are to be treasured.

Everything was iced over.

Last year’s daisy heads were encrusted with ice, lit by the sun as it broke over the tree line.

Wiggonholt Common resides next to Pulborough Brooks the RSPB reserve. It’s a heathland nature reserve home to nightjar, woodlark and other uncommon birds. The views you can get of the heathland and its smattering of pines give it a look of real vulnerability. That’s about right though, as heathland in England is a rare habitat now.

The sun just began to break through the trees and light the trunks of these five pines.

Over on the other side of the common, the sun hadn’t arrived yet. The muddy paths were frozen still and the hoar frost decorated the birch trees growing at the heathland edge.

In the reserve proper, a single oak can be seen at the edge of the farmland where the Arun’s wetlands begin.

Pulborough is a good place to see communities of lichens like cladonia where they splash out across the green timber fencing. No chemicals are in the timber which means the lichens and other fungi proliferate.

The upturned chandeliers of hogweed flowerheads.

Spider silk hung from the twigs of the trees like silly string.

Yellow brain or witches butter, a fungus, looked like a proper tree-bogey.

The spiders webs that remained were laced with frost, as this L-shaped twig displayed so well.

Bracken looking somewhat birdlike, like the back of a golden eagle as it surveys the landscape. Or just some bracken.

The lagoons were glassily calm, marked by the winter calls of waders like redshank. I’m not very good with wading birds, I’m better in the woods. In the distance you will see the South Downs on a clearer day. The mist still sat there to hide them from lowland eyes, with temperatures as low as at least -3.

On my way in a couple had stood for minutes staring through binoculars at a song thrush on the path. I was waiting for them to look away so I could nip by, but it went on for so long I started to wonder if they were statues paid for by Swarovski. Their song thrush was enjoying a moment in the sun as I made my way back up to the exit. A worthy perch for this mighty songster.

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The Sussex Weald

Macro 📷: the glowing bracken

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

One morning recently, I spent a couple of hours wandering around my local tract of the Sussex Weald. The bracken and beech were glowing as the sun edged its way up through trees. The sun had blown the world wide open. After a personal self-imposed Omicron lockdown to protect a significant event, it felt like the sun had ripped up that anxious feeling of being locked away. Life was in full flow:

Sun rising, melting the frost and ice in the woods. Winter bird flocks – blue tit, nuthatch, siskin, lesser redpoll. Great spotted woodpecker hammering to mark out its territory. The chirp of a skylark passing over the canopy, perhaps on migration, maybe heading to the South Downs. The hollow sound of the M23 and aeroplanes connected to nearby Gatwick. The strategic calls of crows. A jay screeching. Gunshots pop beyond the woods.

The light in January and February appears at a fairly sociable hour, and after frost the landscape glistens even more. At this time I seek out beech leaves, with their patchworks of fading cells and arrowing veins.

I was using my 12-100mm f4 zoom lens, with more a mind for landscapes, when I spotted this bracken frond dangling down with a droplet of water at its tip. The sun was creeping up through the pines in the distance. The melting frost in its path upon reaching the bracken providing the lush bokeh circles that bed the image down.

I read recently that the photons of sunlight that touch our skin take 200,000 years to travel from the sun itself. That’s around the time that our ancient Homo sapiens ancestors were evolving. So often we can barely see weeks or months ahead when the world we live in is so ancient in its making, it can feel impossible to comprehend. Taking the time to stop and think about it makes life so much richer.

Thanks for reading.

More macro

Night photography: The Pleiades

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

On the evening of Wednesday 19th January at about 21:00, I spent some time photographing the winter night sky. I was in my West Sussex garden, where there is a surprisingly good clarity of starlight despite the nearby town and railways, etc.

A few nights before when it was a bit cloudier I spent the time just looking through binoculars at the stars. As someone new to stargazing, I was amazed by the gains made from looking through glass. In among the cloud were hundreds of tiny stars where nothing appeared to the eye. This will sound quite dim to more seasoned observers, but the difference made was a joy.

One little cluster I had my eyes on was the Pleiades. This appears to the naked eye like a dusting of light, to the east of Orion. Looking through binoculars gives much greater clarity. On Wednesday night I used my camera to get some images, later cropped and edited a bit in Lightroom.

The Pleiades, from West Sussex, approx. 21:30, 19-1-2022 (Olympus E-M5 MIII + 45mm f1.8 lens (cropped)

The Pleiades is made up of seven larger stars, giving it another name of the ‘Seven Sisters’. That’s the third time that name is used, to my knowledge, in place-naming alongside the Seven Sisters cliffs near Eastbourne in Sussex, and the main road in north-east London. The Seven Sisters road is named after elm trees which are no longer there.

Pablo Carlos Budassi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The above photo by Carlos Budassi is obviously not as good as my attempts (JOKE). It does, however, help to illustrate this star cluster beautifully. I’m not sure of the camera, lens, settings or editing required to produce this image but it is of astonishing quality. Also, how good of Carlos to share this image with Wikimedia Commons so people can use it. Thank you, Carlos.

Dbachmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

The first known depiction of the Pleiades comes from the Bronze Age as seen in the image above. Wikipedia titles the image: “The Nebra sky disk, dated circa 1600 BC. The cluster of dots in the upper right portion of the disk is believed to be the Pleiades.” Indeed, there are seven of them.

Ptolemy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The name ‘Pleiades’ is said to come from the Ancient Greek and is related to sea-faring rather than the Seven Sisters.

Thanks for reading.

Night photography

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Macro 📷: hoar frost

Daniel Greenwood4 Comments

I am a big fan of Russian film and literature. Nature, wildlife and the landscape is often at the forefront of this great field of art. It’s the beating heart of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the poems of Anna Akhmatova and the short stories of Anton Chekhov. The vastness of Russia’s landscapes is central to much of the art to have come out of that amazing and poorly understood country (especially in the UK & US).

In Chekhov’s short stories there are simple, beautiful descriptions of nature. Chekhov travelled widely as a doctor, treating people across Siberia. It’s where he also found time to write his short stores, and much of that work was inspired by his encounters with ‘ordinary people’. The first place that I ever heard of hoar frost, was in one of his short stories.

Living in cities for most of my life where the heat-island effect quickly melted frost and ice, I didn’t really have the chance to see this until moving out to Sussex.

Ground frost forms when the air is still and cold, usually on clear winter nights. Water vapour in the air condenses on solid surfaces, and as the surface temperature drops below 0°C, ice crystals form.

The Woodland Trust: What is hoar frost and how does it form?

The other day on a morning walk before starting work, I saw something close to it. The night before had been clear and full of stars. In the morning I was walking near the river Arun when I began to notice the heavily-frosted grass heads of bent, on the edge of a tennis court where the strimmer can’t reach.

Frost will always remind me of my dad telling us as children that if you put your hand down the sides of the bed Jack Frost would get you (I wrote about this almost exactly a year ago). The cold down there felt so real. Dad got this story from his childhood, when he and his siblings would wake up in their house in Liverpool to find frost inside the windows. My grandmother would greet them all and say that Jack Frost had been to visit. Apparently they absolutely loved that he’d dropped by in the night!

I didn’t have a macro lens with me on this walk, but I pushed my camera’s capabilities to that point. Looking closely at a frosted web which was beginning to lose its frostiness, I noticed a non-biting midge that had become trapped probably days before. The beads of the melted frost were trapped in its hairy antennae and around its limbs. It would look spectacular in extreme close up, but without that equipment at the time, a view of the ‘unfortunate’ insect’s final resting space will suffice.

Thanks for reading.

More macro

Oak timbers: St. Mary’s Churchyard, Horsham

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24-26, The Causeway, Horsham, West Sussex

This post is a bit misleading (hello, Prime Minister) as it’s about a house at the edge of St. Mary’s Churchyard in Horsham, West Sussex. Apologies if you’ve navigated here expecting something more numinous. Here a beautiful old house resides. The problem is it’s name is not exactly blogpost title worthy, and I can’t think of anything snappy. It’s at the end of the famous Causeway, a road that’s renowned for its colourful timber-framed and weather-boarded buildings.

The house is simply called 24-26. It’s dated to 1615 and has since been broken into three properties and extended along the churchyard’s edge. The trees to the right hand side are lime trees that form an avenue along the Causeway, illustrated below at a younger stage:

The Causeway, Horsham, page 112 Book about the Highways and Byways of Co. Sussex, England (via Wikimedia Commons)

There’s no doubt it will have been built with oak timbers from the oak woods of the Sussex Weald nearby, likely from the extensive, pre-modern range of St. Leonard’s Forest.

It is currently covered by hanging tiles and plastering on the street-facing side, meaning no typical black timber frontage can be seen from the outside.

Here’s the Historic England official listing.

Thanks for reading.

Daniel