Death Caps and Hag Stones: and surrounding areas in September A wet summer can bring an early crop of mushrooms. I’ve missed autumn forays with the experts in this plague year, but it’s made me work hard on ID, though sometimes, with mushrooms, it’s beyond me. At times like this I regret living in one of the least-wooded parts of the country. I did, however, on a weekend break to slivers of ancient woodland near Staithes, find some Death Caps (Amanita phalloides) , hard to mistake with their bulbous basal volvas, white gills, and slimy, netted, yellowygreen caps.

Not poisonous to slugs, obviously, but lethal to humans. In a sneaky way. The initial violent symptoms of stomach upset are followed by apparent recovery, but days later death ensues, with the liver destroyed by toxins for which there is no known antidote.

In this respect it’s lucky that we’re a mycophobic nation as such deaths are much less common here than in Europe, where mushroom foraging is normal, and there are more forests.

One of the delights of mycophilia is how you can use all your senses to ID, including taste and smell. Most fun is to be had with the milkcap genus (Lactaria). These exude a milk from the gills, all of which can be tasted, and this can help with ID. Some are hot, others acrid, and a few turn very bitter after initial mildness. It’s always worth taking strong mints on a fungus foray. This beauty (page 2) from Mines Wood, Staithes, tasted mild, and you can see how profuse the milk is, but I’ve failed so far on deciding its species. I thought I’d found Saffron or False Saffron, but their milk is carrotcoloured, not white, so I suspect the Tawny or Orange Milkcap.

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Another nice find was Hare’s Ear (Otidia onotica). These are saprobic, living off leaf litter and other dead plant material, but many of the mushrooms like the amanitas and lactarias are mycorrhizal, joined to the roots of trees and forming a wood-wide web.

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We’re just beginning to glimpse the complexity of life down there. Trees and fungi communicate with each other through the fungal mycelia using a range of chemical and electrical signals that we still don’t understand. They don’t just feed each other (trees photosynthesise sugars for the fungi while the mycelia transport water and minerals for the trees), they seem to be able to alert each other of attack from insects and other fungi, and who knows what else they can communicate.

While I snuffle around the floor of Mines Wood like a pig rooting for truffles, just yards away is the Boulby Potash Mine, the deepest in the UK at over a kilometre. This mine claims to be the world’s only producer of Polyhalite, an evaporate formed 260 million years ago beneath the layers of potash. Ironic perhaps that this fertiliser allows the kind of intensive agriculture responsible for destroying so much of the ancient woodland of which I’m exploring just a fragment nearby.

Deep in this mine, in another strange underworld, censors are trying to intercept particles of dark matter, in a quest to understand the 85% of the universe that has so far eluded science.

But Mines Wood gets its name from an earlier mining operation: tunnels used to carry the alum mined from the shale at the nearby Boulby Cliffs, the highest on the east coast. One of these tunnels is a refuge for overwintering Long-eared bats.

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Above left: the alum mine working remains at Boulby Cliff. Above right: tunnel relics in Mines Wood.

A geological highlight of my September was a trip to the Keyingham Sand and Gravel Quarry with the Hull Geological Society. This is a family firm owned by geologist father Stephen and son Jim. With their help and that of HGS members I was able to collect pebbles from among the sorted gravel heaps telling the story of the journey of the ice sheets that covered our area up to around 13K years ago.

The quarry lies on the great belt of sands and gravels deposited by periglacial meltwaters flowing out of the ice sheets and stretches in a loop from the Brandesburton area. It contains erratics, some of which have been carried by the ice from Norway and northern Scotland, as well as shells of Ice Age creatures, which we were able to find in the unsorted heaps recently dug up.

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Left: a view of the quarry from the unsorted piles of sand and gravel. These piles contained shelly remains as well as erratics.

B elow left top : Jasper, possibly from north - western Scotland

Below right top : granite with a zenolith, literally ‘st ranger rock’, where the upswelling magma has swallowed a piece of country rock.

Bottom: large-grained porphyry from Norway (left) and small-grained porphyry possibly from Cheviot (right).

Granite and porphyry are igneous rocks but there are plenty of fossils too, most of which can be easily found on our coastline, many from the Jurassic coast around Scarborough and

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Whitby, transported here by the coastal ice sheets. Others come from the Carboniferous rocks of the Dales, brought by ice sheets from the northwest. Here are some fossils I found at Keyingham below.

Above left: an unusually coarse-ribbed ammonite arm and right: a piece of Cleveland Ironstone containing embedded bivalves and a belemnite.

Above left: serpulids, fossilised worms. The reverse side of the same pebble (above right) showing sponge marks, indicating that this was formed in very shallow water, possibly on a beach.

Above left: the very common Gryphaea, commonly known as ‘devil’s toenails’, an extinct type of oyster. Right: a coral swarm. Finally, a piece of chalk with a hole through it, the like of which you must have spotted on your beach walks. This has probably been made by a toothed bivalve called a ‘boring piddock’. Once

6 tunnelled in, the piddock will extend its fleshy siphon out to filter phytoplankton and will spend the rest of its life in its hole. You can often find the embedded shells of the piddocks. The living piddocks are bioluminescent and I prefer their other folk name of ‘angelwings’, describing the white spread of the bivalve shells. There’s a fair bit of folklore around these stones: they’re supposed to be a lucky find and serve as protective talismans (get out to Mappleton!) and are called ‘witch stones’ or ‘hag stones’.

While s till able to venture out in small groups, September took me out with the Hull Natural History S ociety to Hollym Carrs , a nature reserve in Holderness created and run by volunteers.

Here we found a pair of Ruddy Darters, distinguishable from the Common Da rters by the males usually being slightly redder and more slender - waisted, but the most reliable ID is the lack of yellow strip e on the legs. Here the male is guarding the female in tandem, clasping her until she lays her eggs to try to ensure parentage.

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Left: male Ruddy Darter

Below: Greenbottle on Greater Water Parsnip (Sium latifolium), now uncommon in this area.

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Left: Jointed Rush Gall(Livia juncorum) created by a small jumping louse.

Left: Bill Dolling pointed out the remains of a bark- boring beetle at Hollym, probably Ash Bark Beetle (Leperisinus varius), on the trunk of an ash tree sadly killed by ash dieback, a fungal diease.

these tunnels. The horizontal line at the bottom is where the adult laid her eggs, and the branch tunnels are where

the larvae hatched and ate into the bark.

The larvae will

pupate at the end of

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There are still plenty of late - flowering delights around.

Left : Old Man’s Beard, or Traveller’s Joy (Clematis vitalba) growing in its preferred chalky soil by the at .

Left middle : There’s a small colony of Devil’s Bit Scabious ( Succisa pratensis) grows late every summer on the spoil heaps of the ancient enclosure at the far western edge of Beverley Westwood , beside the golf course.

Below left : Yellow - wort (Blackstonia

perfoliata) in the gentian family loves dry chalky or sandy places, but you need to catch it before noon to see its flowers open. It s peculiar glauc o us leaves protect it from drought. Here in flower at the Keyingham Quarry.

Below right: Sea Aster (Tripolium pannonicum), confined to salt marsh and estuaries, here in flower at Sand - le - Mere.

Page 10: big skies and the lonely Holderness c oast at Sand - le -Mere.

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Nearer home, there’s plenty to see on the Beverley Commons. Here’s a Green-veined White posing on Figham Common.

On Beverley Westwood, I’ve been watching ‘first responder’ toadstools spring up for some shortlived fruiting on piles of woodchip from trees felled in Newbegin Pits last year.

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Here are three:

Top: Hare’s-foot inkcaps (Coprinopsis lagopus) which deliquesce in hours to an inky sludge. Bottom left: a forest of what I think are Common Conecaps (Conocybe tenera). Right: Sulphur Tufts (Hypholoma fasciculare), one of the commonest wood rotting fungi, and easy to identify by colour.

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Slightly less welcome is this Giant Polypore (Meripilis giganteus) growing at a base of a huge beech in the Pits. It’s a parasitic fungus causing ‘white rot’, which also becomes saprobic (feeding on dead matter) when the tree dies.

This looks like a Blushing Bracket ( Daedaleopsis confragosa), a bracket with elongated pores ( in North Cliffe Woods) .

Overleaf is a Chicken of the Woods ( Laetiporus sulphureus), an edible bracket growing on hardwoods in Burton Bushes.

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A very small Beefsteak Fungus ( Fistulina hepatica) in Burton Bushes . When mature these ‘bleed’ red, hence the name.

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Some mushrooms can look suspiciously edible , rather like this ring in Newbegin Pits resembling horse mushrooms. However, when you cut the flesh and it turns sulphurous yellow yo u know you’re more likely to have a Yellow Stainer (Agaricus xanthodermus) and could be in for a nasty stomach upset if you eat them.

Another lookalike mushroom is this small toadstool on Westwood pastures which I think is a Stinking Dapperling (Lepiota cristata), below left, described as ‘suspect to poisonous’. It’s superficially a miniature version of the edible Parasol, which also grows on the pastures in summer and can be very large. Also causing stomach upsets to some is the smaller but still quite large woodland version, the Shaggy Parasol (Chlorophyllum rhacodes), growing here in Newbegin Pits (below right).

Of course not all the mushrooms are saprobic, living off dead material, or parasitic on living wood. In the heart of older, probably ancient woodland like Burton Bushes and North Cliffe Woods you can find plenty of mycorrhizal fungi that live in a symbiotic relationship with trees.

One of the more recognisable of these is the Russula, or Brittlegill genus, from the same family as milkcaps. They tend to be colourful, have whitish stipes and gills, caps from which the skin is easily peeled, very brittle gills, and have usually been half eaten by slugs before you get to them. Here overleaf are two common ones, the first is, I think, the Purple Brittlegill (Russula atropurpurea), and the one below the Ochre Brittlegill (Russula ochraleuca.) The latter is the only one I’m really confident about identifying. These are easy to find if you’re willing to search around under trees and, in the case of North Cliffe Woods, brave the guerrilla mosquitoes.

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Having become confident enough now to taste milkcaps, I’ve now begun to taste the brittlegills, to help with ID. They range from mild but slightly hot (Ochres), to peppery (Purples), to very hot and bitter (the poisonous ones), Yes, a tiny taste and then you spit it out just in case. I don’t suggest you try this until you’re a hopeless fungiphile which I have become in this plague year. It helps to know your russulas from your poisonous amanitas.

Helen Kitson November 2020

Top: Purple Brittlegill (Russula atropurpurea); bottom: Ochre Brittlegill (Russula ochraleuca)

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