Tag: Sussex Weald

Late summer timbers at the Weald & Downland Museum

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

In August I made my annual visit to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in the South Downs.

You can see my timber-framed building photo gallery here.

This is the first view you encounter inside the museum grounds after you pay your entry fee. Amazing to think the medieval hall house is from Cray in the London Borough of Bexley. It dates to the 1400s.

The Titchfield Market Hall has recently been restored. It’s looking very good indeed now. These halls were once more common in English market towns, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen one in situ. How times change.

The House from Walderton punctuates a quintessential Weald and Downland Museum scene.

These charming railway cottages are a game of two halves. In one part (here on the right) you can see the internal structure of the building. On the left hand side you can see a furnished representation of the cottage.

Poplar Cottage is one of my favourites. I’ve posted about it before.

Bayleaf‘s grandeur isn’t fully accounted for in these three images. It’s a large Wealden Hall that has been dated to the early 1400s.

Pendean sits out of view on the top slopes of the museum grounds. Its timbers are dated to 1609 (the year they were felled – amazing, isn’t it).

Tindalls Cottage is more recent, being from the 1700s. It has a bit of an eerie vibe about it, not sure why.

Mediaeval Hall dates from the 1600s. It’s a beauty.

I’ve been visiting the museum since 2018 but only managed to see the cart and vehicle section for the first time during this visit. Some of the wheels on show were huge. It would have been amazing to see these carts wending their way around Sussex once upon a time.

Thanks for reading

Oak timbers

Podcast: summer fungi walk

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

Earlier this week I went for a short walk around part of the Sussex Weald to see if any mushrooms had popped up. We’ve experienced one of the driest springs on record and the warmest June for England, as well as three heatwaves already! Me and mushrooms don’t need three heatwaves, thanks.

You can listen to my recording and all other episodes of Unlocking Landscapes here, and across all the major platforms.

Mushrooms need rain, warmth and moisture to thrive, and after a downpour earlier in the day I thought it might be worth having a look. Here’s what happened:

You can see more of my fungi blogs on Fungi Friday

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Podcast: is ivy good or bad for trees?

Daniel GreenwoodLeave a comment

I’ve started recording episodes again for my podcast Unlocking Landscapes. The latest episode is one about ivy and trees, a subject I find very interesting – I know a lot of people do.

You can listen here on YouTube or just search on any podcast-streaming platform:

The episode is only ten minutes and covers the following:

  • What ivy looks like
  • The ecology of ivy
  • Managing ivy on trees
  • Myths and misinformation about ivy
  • When people commit crimes against ivy(!)
  • Wildlife supported by ivy

My aim is to post once a quarter, recordings to take place outdoors, be quite focused and to be around 10 minutes long.

Thanks for listening!

Sussex Weald: song thrush rules

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk in my local slice of the Sussex Weald before work in recent weeks. The impact it has on my brain, body and soul is profound, having lost my connection with woodland somewhat recently.

Early spring is a special time in woodland, watching the the leaves appear, the first spring birds, and the woodland flowers. It is so much better than those hot, shady and sterile days of summer, in my view.

The chiffchaffs have been arriving, but the song thrush rules this chunk of the Weald. Its repeated phrases echo through the still leafless branches.

Wild branches against ranks of pine and birch.

Those birches, growing on old heathland, waiting for the onset of new leaves.

A birch tree harassed by honeysuckle, catching the morning light.

A green beech tree with lots of moss and algae.

The ride, with pines reaching across on either side.

Silver birches among bluebell leaves.

An old beech tree.

Bluebell leaves appearing below a mess of beech twigs and old leaves.

The grassy banks of the woodland ride. I often hear firecrest singing along these edges where the ivy climbs and a few evergreen trees like the cypresses grow.

Thanks for reading.

Hoar frost days ❄️

Daniel Greenwood8 Comments

West Sussex, January 2025

One of the nice things about not living in a city is that you get to see hoar frost. I know this because I’ve spent most of my life in cities where the ‘heat island effect’ usually won’t allow for hoar frost to really develop during daylight hours.

Bramble leaves make it through the winter, providing a good platform for these frost spikes.

This thick frost covers the trees and hedges, everything vegetative really, in a thin veil of icing. The puddles become milky ice clouds.

After a very dark, grey and damp December, these blue skies and frosty landscapes have been welcome relief.

Not a great time to sit on a bench though.

This is a reed with a coating of frost.

Remarkably this oak tree still holds its leaves, which is unusual outside of cities in January. I have known deciduous oaks to hold leaves into January in London.

I always seek them out in this weather, especially with a little bit of backlighting. This is quite a heavy crop so the sharpness is lessened a bit. You probably don’t care.

That distant landscape is actually an equestrian estate. It is chewed to within an inch of its life, hence the black sticks of trees, compared to the rough grassland where I stood to take the photo.

Thanks for reading.

Camped out on a dragonfly

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

In August I was camping in West Sussex. On the final morning I opened the tent door and nearly stepped on a dragonfly that was resting in the grass outside.

It had been a cloudy night and the ground was very dry compared with the previously dew-laden start.

The dragonfly is probably a migrant hawker (Aeshna mixta) and is known to breed in SE England. As its name suggests it can also migrate to England from southern Europe.

It’s a dream to find a dragonfly in such a restful state, although the insect is vulnerable. It was in the right place however, especially if it wanted its portrait done.

It was an excellent opportunity to look at the wings of the dragonfly close up. They are renowned for their beauty and likeness to stained glass.

By looking at the wings I noticed that a planthopper bug had leapt aboard the dragonfly.

Here’s a closer view. I’m not sure of the species but it’s one I don’t remember seeing before.

A day earlier we had walked along the River Adur, famous for its connection at Knepp Wildland. It was good to see some more wasps around, with so few of them being reported this year.

The wasp is scrapping a layer of wood from a handrail or fence post to be used in the construction of a nest. You can see the ball below its mandibles above.

What a lot of hard work, worthy of my respect that’s for sure.

Thanks for reading.

Macro

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

White-tailed eagles at Pulborough

Daniel Greenwood6 Comments

Pulborough Brooks, West Sussex, February 2024

Looking out over the Brooks, two dark bird-shapes soar against the faint outline of the South Downs. Below them are green conifers and leafless oaks.

Buzzards, I think.

A woman approaches me from behind and stands to the side of me. ‘Dude,’ she says. ‘There’re eagles out there!’.

I look through my binoculars again but can’t see any sign of white-tailed eagles (it’s not going to be golden eagle). They’re known to hang around the wetlands of Amberley and Pulborough, having been reintroduced to the Isle of Wight in recent years. This is an ideal place for them.

The images I’m looking for are brown and white Muppet-like characters, as I remember seeing them in Hungary and Czechia. Never before in Britain, though.

The eagle messenger tells me to head down to some of the hides where ‘someone will have a scope’.

I march down there and drop into the first hide, benches packed out. But people are only looking down at the bank right outside where a snipe stands still against the grass. There is no eagle energy here.

A man with a telescope and tripod on his shoulder and a camera around his neck walks down the path towards me. I ask about the eagles. They’ve gone off somewhere, he says, wishing he could be more help.

Heading to the next hide, which I recognise as the one the eagle messenger told me to stop off at, there’s palpable excitement among the benches. I find a spare seat and ask the woman next to me – is everyone looking for eagles?

She smiles, pointing out where they had just been seen. I listen as others describe their apparent return to view. Against the South Downs two dark shapes soar. Then I realise it – I’d already seen them, before I even knew what they were.

They weren’t buzzards, they were white-tailed eagles.

Sussex Weald

Sussex Weald: bitter battles of survival

Daniel Greenwood5 Comments

High Weald, West Sussex, January 2024

At the entrance to the woodland a sign warns of forestry activities. It’s time to expect deep rutting to the tracks and soil, and conifers pulled out of this vast area of afforested heathland, and old oak and beech woodland.

A song thrush lifts up from the track and onto a nearby branch. Their lives are bitter battles of survival in January. In early spring their music travels the woods and fields, parks and gardens. The bird stoops on the branch, eyeing me in that wild way.

The sun is shining and the birches gleam white in the treetops. 

Pine needles are bleached to an almost aquamarine.

On the main trackway the machine rutting appears from a tract of maturing pine, oak and birch. A track churned-out by huge tyres and now full of milky-brown rainwater. The tyres, inevitably, have dug up sections of ditches where fleabane, hemp agrimony and common spotted orchids abound in summer.

Then again, this trackway and its ditches were likely created for the forestry works, so it’s maybe a case of swings and roundabouts. The extraction works are set to end here in the near future, no doubt to allow the woodland to move at its own pace. Plantation trees will be replaced by self-seeded birch, and the jays’ forgotten oak cache, if the deer don’t eat them.

There is something unexpectedly wild about forestry landscapes, their lack of obvious human culture. There is not much coppicing here, not much lopping or billhooking. No dining tables are set by charcoal burners, or mud huts packed up inside clearings.

No one is claiming it for their own, not even the foresters.

The Sussex Weald

Mushroom, mushroom burning bright 🍄

Daniel Greenwood3 Comments

…in the forest on a warm July afternoon.

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.

Thanks for reading.

Fungi