Luxuriant growth of a lichen in a hedge in the Tunstall valley

 A leafless hawthorn hedge in the Tunstall valley, County Durham, shorn with geometric precision by a tractor-mounted hedge cutter, but decorated with one of the most luxuriant arrays of lichens I’ve ever seen. Much of the hedge was bare, apart from scattered yellow encrustations of common orange lichen Xanthoria parietina, but short lengths were festooned, like overdressed Christmas trees, with countless dangling fronds of farinose cartilage lichen Ramalina farinacea.

This valley offers high quality lichen habitat, thanks to relatively unpolluted North Pennine winds and humidity from Tunstall reservoir, but why had these short lengths of hedge become so gloriously laden with this particular species? I recalled walking here last summer and finding the same sections defoliated by small ermine moth caterpillars that had sheathed twigs in their silken web. By autumn the hedge had begun to recover, but maybe that leaf-loss and interruption in twig growth had given wind-blown lichen spores sufficient opportunity to colonise bare twigs, trapped by that web of sticky silk? It’s tempting to believe that the beauty of this winter hedgerow was due to the arrival of an egg-laying female ermine moth last spring, a serendipitous event in the endless, unpredictable cycle of life.

Anxious Parent

Every year sandpipers nest around the edge of Tunstall reservoir near Wolsingham in Weardale, but they are usually pretty elusive - frequently heard but most often seen flying away, low over the water with their fast, shallow wingbeats.

This one, though, must have had chicks somewhere nearby because it did its best to divert our attention, circling around us with a lot of frantic piping then settling on the wall. 

A Glass Half-full kind of Summer....

.... a glass half-full of rainwater, that is.


I should be sitting in the garden sipping chilled wine now, not watching rain running down the window.

And this rain-spattered drone fly should be hovering in a shaft of sunlight. Still, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and .....

..... these house martins have plenty of mud available for nest construction. They were collecting mud around this puddle near Tunstall reservoir in Weardale yesterday. Seems very late to be building nests - I wonder if they were collecting it for nest repair?

Perfect weather for slugs too. I shudder to think what they are doing to my garden, but this one was demolishing a buttercup flower in the road verge.

Good weather for fungal growth too. These brackets were on a dead branch in Backstone Bank wood near Wolsingham.

And good weather for ducks, like this mallard surrounded by rain-bejewelled grasses.

And the raindrops do make an attractive pattern in the shallow water around the edge of Tunstall reservoir.


Accentuate the positive, as the song says....

Carnivorous Plants 2: Round-leaved Sundew

On the hillside above Tunstall reservoir in Weardale there's a patch of ground that's always wet, even during a drought, where a spring trickles out of the ground. It's home to a collection of bog plants that include tiny round-leaved sundew Drosera rotundifolia which grows amongst the Sphagnum moss shoots. You need to get down on your hands and knees to examine these plants, whose leaves protrude from the Sphagnum like bejewelled, beckoning hands tempting small insects to make the fatal mistake of landing on their glistening tentacles. It's well worth suffering wet knees to appreciate their sinister beauty.

You can find more on larger, more exotic sundew species by clicking here.

Backstone Bank Wood

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a late winter walk from Salter's Gate, high on the moorland above Tow Law in County Durham, down to Tunstall Reservoir and Backstone Bank wood. The most picturesque way to approach the wood is to first follow the route of this old railway line, part of the old Stockton and Darlington railway that was opened in 1845 to carry passengers and coal to the ironworks at Consett. The line closed in 1939 but it must have been a great train ride in its day ....

... with wonderful views down to the reservoir, built in 1879, .....

... and across wild moorland of Wolsingham Park Moor.

When you leave the rail track and follow the stony path downhill it takes you down past larch and spruce plantations, that have a wonderful scent of resin on a winter's day.

After heavy rain, all the way down you are never far from the sound of water cascading down from the hillside in the feeder streams that drain into the reservoir

...until you reach Backstone Bank wood, an ancient semi-natural woodland of oak, holly and birch that's now an SSSI.

The path through the woodland skirts the edge of the reservoir and is popular with birdwaters. There are sandpipers here in summer, geese and ducks on the reservoir and woodland birds that include redstarts and pied flycatchers. This, incidentally, is the point where we crossed paths with that magnificent pheasant that I mentioned in an earlier post.

At this time of year the brightest green is confined to the woodrushs - still flattened from the winter snow - and new growth of mosses.

The humidity makes this a good spot for lichens like this Cladonia...

... and in late winter many mosses, like this Polytrichum species, produce new growth before the leaf canopy develops in spring and casts them into shade.

The oaks are rooted in poor soil in a severe climate so growth is very slow. Near the end of the walk through the wood we came across this stump that had been cut, presumably to remove a tree that had blown down in the recent gales. We gave up counting the annual rings after we got to 100 but they are each notably narrow - testament to the short growing season.

When you emerge from the wood the path crosses the dam wall, with this view of water overflowing and cascading down the spillway into Waskerley Beck, which must have extraordinarily well oxygenated headwaters. It eventually flowers into the River Wear at Wolsingham, at the bottom of the valley.

Serpents and Vampires

It always seems to me that there’s a hint of menace in the way that bracken fronds erupt through the soil in spring. There’s something of the serpent about them and it wouldn’t come as a complete surprise if they hissed as they straightened their stems towards the sun. As in many other parts of the North Pennines, large patches of hillside above Tunstall reservoir in Weardale (bottom picture) are covered in this fern, that’s expanding its canopy of fronds now. Part of the fern’s success comes from the fact that it’s loaded with toxic compounds, so very few insects will feed on it, but other plants do flourish in the boggy patches amongst its uncurling stems in early spring - including this lousewort whose attractive pink flowers belie a rather gruesome botanical trait. Lousewort Pedicularis sylvatica is a partial parasite on grass roots. Below the surface it has plugged itself into the root systems of surrounding vegetation, siphoning off their water and nutrients: lousewort is a vegetable vampire.