Hoyland Bank

GREATER STITCHWORT and Bluebell are in flower amongst the monuments in the churchyard at High Hoyland. A Red-legged Partridge and a female Pheasant seem at home amongst the headstones. The church, which closed some thirty years ago, is now an outreach of Bretton Hall College.

Opposite the church, King Alfred's Cakes, a black burnt looking fungus, also known as Cramp Balls, grows on a decaying Ash, which I remember as a towering tree on previous visits. Ear Fungus grows on a fallen sycamore bough.

A grey leafy lichen lichen (probably 'Crottle', Parmelia saxatalis) grows in beer mat size splodges on the top of a drystone wall with a feathery gold-tipped moss below. The pale blue green lichen Lecanora conizaeoides encrusts a nearby tree trunk. Some person has carefully carved their initials, 'W. H. S. 1935' on an old stone gate post.

Wood Sorrel, its shamrock leaves folded back, is in flower in Hoyland Bank wood, along with Stitchwort and Bluebell, but, in this part of the wood, we see no Wood Anemone.

The wood below the church has been selectively thinned in recent years and soft grass now carpets most of the slope. A bonfire site by a pile of logs has been entirely colonised by a mat of Funaria hygrometrica, a moss that makes bonfire sites its speciality.

How does it find its way here? Assuming that one or two spores have found their way here on the wind, how did it manage to spread over the four foot diameter patch of charcoal in such a short time (a year?). It has sprouted a mass of spore capsules each of which is held on a curved stem.

At least two Skylarks sing above the fields of Clayton Hall Farm. Chaffinches sing from the trees and bushes alongside a water course. Red Deadnettle, Field Speedwell and a small cress with leaves similar to a Dandelion, grow as weeds in arable fields.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator
E-mail;'richard@daelnet.co.uk'