A beautiful set of Grey Squirrel prints on a path well wetted by the autumn-showers
The squirrels didn’t get all of them yet! Yes, it’s autumn, and the squirrels are busily snipping off little stalks with berries on them all over the reserve.
Puffballs, well mature and splitting, showing their grainy surface and stalks
Lower Barden Reservoir, constructed in the 1880s by Bradford Corporation Water Works
Barden Moor is an extensive water catchment area, on acidic rock (Millstone Grit), providing soft drinking water to the city of Bradford. The area is part of the ancient Bolton Abbey estate, and is now also in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It’s covered in heather and moorgrass with areas of meadow and bog pools. It’s a fine place for an open airy walk away from the sometimes busy mountaintops, and a wonderful spot for nature.
Apricot Club, Clavulinopsis luteoalba. The fungi are yellow all over, but some look white in the bright light. The clubs are quite broad, unlike the slim spindles of C. fusiformis.
The grooved Earthtongue, Geoglossum cookeanum
Persistent Waxcap, Hygrocybe persistens
Blackening Waxcap, Hygrocybe conica
Like much of Britain’s uplands, the land is managed by muirburn, controlled burning of the moorland, to encourage new growth of heather, mainly Ling, which is the principal food of Red Grouse, and is also nibbled by the hardy upland sheep, which of course prefer open areas with grass to tall woody bushes. The thin ash-grey subsoil (Podsol, Russian for ash-soil) can be seen on the trackside bank.
Podsol on top of Millstone Grit, the local rock. The soil is black and slightly peaty with plant material at the top, then quickly turns to a poor subsoil with sand and fragments of rock, and then not very far down, actual bedrock.
Rowan (Mountain Ash) in full fruit
Maidenhair Spleenwort, Asplenium trichomanes, a beautiful small fern of rocks and walls
This seems to be a Dapperling; I’d have said it was Lepiota hystrix except that that’s a woodland species. Suggestions?
One of the Cladonia ground-living lichens of the ‘reindeer moss’ group. This one might be C. portentosa, which likes acid moorland.
Dog Lichen, Peltigera canina, a lichen of sandy moorland.
A handsome crustose lichen on rock, cf. Ochrolechia.
Well, I haven’t lost my ‘at courting Mary Jane on Ilkla Moor, but here I am not wearing it, atop the Cow Rock, with the Cow and Calf inn behind me. Very happy to be able to get out of town, finally, for a holiday; to be in beautiful countryside; and (even though it’s October) to be in wonderful shirtsleeve weather at 21 Celsius. It doesn’t happen every day.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
