What's life to a lichen?

I really do enjoy looking at lichens and I often think to myself that I ought to try to get to grips with identifying them. Then I remember that Scotland is home to over 1500 species! I'd best just stick to being charmed by them! They are even more charming when seen through the looking glass.

Lichens have long been used for for dyeing cloth and other fabrics in Scotland, first as a cottage industry and later on a commercial scale. The lichens were scraped off the rocks using metal hoops, spoons and, in the poorer districts, seashells. As late as the 1950s, black, three-legged iron pots used for boiling lichens could be seen outside many crofts in the Hebrides. The browns and fawns of traditional woven Harris tweed were produced from a closely-related group of lichens called crottle using stale piss as a mordant.