Steinpilz

Unspeakable weather has kept everyone confined most of the day but on a brief foray into Newport/Trefdraeth I paid a courtesy call to the Carreg Coetan Arthur burial chamber that I blipped earlier this year.

It's notably fungal in shape especially when seen from the north although the hedge prevents you getting a good shot of it. So here's just a portion of the lichened capstone and the vertical beneath, upon which it appears to rest (but doesn't.) What I like about this angle is the structure's strong resemblance to a Boletus edulis, cep/cèpe in English/French and in German 'steinpilz', which actually means 'stone mushroom'. Here's one to compare.

I noticed that the water running off the cap of the ancient 'steinpilz' had created vertical trickles which were darkened by algae (I think) and which gave the impression of the pores on the broken edge of a Boletus. I've put a close-up image of that here.

Now I find that the burial chamber was once known as Mushroom Cromlech according to this 1950s postcard. (Cromlech, meaning curved slab in Welsh, is a now-outmoded word for this kind of tomb which would originally have lurked, fungus-like, under a mound of earth.)