Names

We had a hilarious time failing to visit a stone. It sits in the centre of a triangular area of land. We walked two sides of it, after which I have an out-of-focus grey square on a green horizon, glimpsed through the bottom of the hedgerow after scrambling up the bank at the side of a typical Welsh sunken lane. We drove along the third side. There is a gate into the field next to the field with the stone, but no road gate into the stone field. I drove around the entire triangle one more time to check, by which time our visitors were beginning to laugh nervously on the back seat. Perhaps we should be more pushy, but I'm happy to grant the stone its privacy

It's not a pre-historic stone, but it is historically important. It is a 6th century burial stone with a Latin inscription saying it is for someone called Corbalengi (or possibly just Balengi) who was an 'Ordovician'. The Ordovicians were a pre-Roman British tribe in North Wales, so this is a tribute to a man from another area. It is also evidence that the tribal identities of the pre-Roman time survived the occupation and withdrawal. The name of the Ordovician tribe survives now as the name of an early geoligical period during which the oceans were rich with molluscs and arthropods, and the first land plants appeared

A little way away, an isolated plain white church with no tower, set in a graveyard of grey stones, all supporting large grey-green lichens. An imposing gateway of grey stone, also supporting grey and off-white lichens. And then, at the top of one stone gate-post, this small patch of vibrant yellow. If I have misidentified it, I don't care, because the species I think it is is so engaging. It matches pictures and description of Rhizocarpon geographicum ('map lichen'), named because the way it grows, with small, discrete areas of yellow surrounded by darker borders, makes it look like a map of small fields. I also read that this species was sent on a scientific mission into space, where it was exposed, unprotected, to space conditions for 10 days before being brought back to Earth, where "it showed minimal changes or damage". So far