I conjured the waxcap’s mycorrhiza – the tendrils of its root system, longer than human memory – spreading towards the base of a nearby oak, whose sinuous branches reach out across the void above the water’s flow. Confined to the oldest pastures free from agricultural “improvement”, they are abundant only where the soil has not been broken in living memory. By lunchtime we have recorded four that are globally threatened – crimson, ballerina, citrine and splendid waxcap – yet here they thrive on fields farmed with the lightest touch. I seldom regret an early start, but still, it’s hard to do. This morning, I’m incentivised by a commitment to a citizen science effort monitoring four farmland birds of particular concern. I have two transects to walk at dawn, across a square covering the edge of the North York Moors escarpment and the steep and glorious Garbutt Wood immediately below, managed by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. I’ve barely left the car park at Sutton Bank before the first of the quartet declares itself emphatically present: song thrush, herald of the day. Sunrise brings the second, a male yellowhammer like a drop of gold spilled from the crucible just after it clears the horizon. I have a few false starts on bird three, the common redstart. Willow warblers and chaffinches have similar tumbling phrases, and the wood abounds with them both.

All this concentration of life around a unique history makes this place an island of enchantment in a land that continues to haemorrhage wildness in an ecological crisis. And who am I to parade my privileges up here, as if my maleness, whiteness, ableness and education entitles me to comment on a world being destroyed by me and people like me? It’s about time these privileges were spent and our diversities and divergences celebrated as kin to this wild life. A Country Diary Clifford Harper (36 of Harper's drawings, plus an essay by Richard Boston), Agraphia Press (2003) ISBN 1-904596-00-2A Burren Journal Sarah Poyntz (illustrated by Gordon D'Arcy and Anne Korff), Tír Eolas (2000) ISBN 1-873821-13-1 I grew up in an England where badgers were rare enough to warrant conservation. Now there’s a sett just 100 metres from my front door, but I’ll never lose the thrill of a new encounter. This is a serpentine female. After a minute she emerges fully from the leaves and pauses to scan the surroundings – appearing to look right at me before continuing with such insouciance that there’s time to stop and sniff as she crosses the path.

The column is credited with the first use in print of the term " Jizz", in a piece by Thomas Coward of 6 December 1921, subsequently included in his 1922 book "Bird Haunts and Nature Memories". [1] He attributed it to "a west-coast Irishman". [1] Bibliography [ edit ] We eat by an abandoned hill farm, or tholtan. Like Scotland, our uplands have been cleared, but here it was voluntary, indicated by field names such as Ohio, Egypt and Virginia. This tholtan has a horse-walk – a traction-powered mill, proving that a century or more ago these fields were indeed ploughed. Despite the passage of time, the fields closest to the mill still contain the fewest waxcaps, playing catchup to the other nearby pastures. You can read the history of a place through its mushrooms. A Country Diary - Kent John T. White (illustrated by Percy F. C. White), Cassell (1974) ISBN 0-903253-04-6Attempting to ignore such distractions, we stare at our feet as we search for one of the unsung delights of these islands: grassland fungi. To the uninitiated they are essentially invisible. Many farmers of a good age are unaware of their presence in fields they have shepherded their whole life. Waxcaps, crazed caps, corals, clubs, earth tongues, spindles, pinkgills; their names redolent of their forms.

A Lifetime of Mountains: The Best of A. Harry Griffin's 'Country Diary' A. Harry Griffin ( edited by Martin Wainwright, foreword by Chris Bonington), Aurum Press Ltd., (2005), ISBN 1-84513-112-6 Enid J. Wilson's Country Diary Enid J. Wilson (illustrated by Pavla Davey), Hodder and Stoughton (1988) ISBN 0-340-41522-3

Share this article