Walking in the forest

The sun shone almost without a break today, so we decided to take the dogs for a good long walk in part of nearby Rockingham Forest. This was formerly a medieval hunting forest, and is now a beautiful patchwork of ancient woodlands and open agricultural land with historic features and attractive stone-built forest villages.

The area we visited has a mix of broadleaved woodland and conifer plantations, and it was the latter that were particularly good for fungi today. We ended up collecting well over twenty species, and that was ignoring the ones I'm certainly not competent enough to identify. One patch of pine, very close to the location of this picture, had hundreds of earthstars - I've never seen so many at one time before. If you want to see some of the fungi we gathered you can find them here.

I took a number of photos of the forest, with the low autumn light coming through the trees, but this was voted the family favourite. If you look closely you can just see a human disappearing into the trees - that's Pete, my other half.