Time in the Wood

A short walk to a wood. A little reading finds that it was once common grazing - probably a bit like the New Forest - but was enclosed by its owner (an aristocrat of obscure origin) 700 years ago, to create a deer park for recreational hunting

Two or three hundred years later, it became managed woodland. The state-of-the-art system at the time was 'coppice with standards': poorer quality trees regularly cut to the ground (coppiced); better quality trees allowed to grow to maturity to produce high quality timber. The coppiced wood produced charcoal, for smelting iron (we are in Sheffield!) and 'white coal' - wood that was dried in pits called 'Q-pits' and used for smelting lead (charcoal burns too hot for this job)

Roll forward two more centuries to the 1800s, and it is commercial plantation, growing stands of non-native species for timber. This came and went within 100 years, which is really only one or two generations of trees. After centuries as an economic resource, the wood became unmanaged an unexploited, disappearing under housing schemes

Enter a familiar figure: J G Graves, whose name appears all over Sheffield. Another of those classic capitalist philanthropists. Graves was the Jeff Bezos of his day, who made a fortune from a mail order business a century ago, then devoted a lot of his wealth to the city that gave him his opportunity to grow rich. He funded the purchase of the wood by the city authorities, creating the public amenity we could walk around, and discover the many fungal species that have thrived on all those centuries of tree cover

This is a shaggy inkcap, common enough, but a fine example. And it gives me the opportunity to use the word 'deliquesce', which is what this fruiting body will do as it matures, creating the black, spore-filled liquid that gives it its name