- Priddy Fern List ST55F ( a quick way to describe part of an OS Grid square)
- Apologies for the Latin – English names are second
- Asplenium adiantum-nigrum – Black Spleenwort
- * Asplenium ceterach – Rustyback
- Asplenium ruta-muraria – Wall Rue
- * Asplenium scolopendrium – Hart’s Tongue
- * Asplenium trichomanes – Maidenhair Spleenwort
- Blechnum spicant – Hard Fern
- Dryopteris affinis – Golden Scaled Male Fern
- Dryopteris carthusiana – Narrow Buckler Fern
- Dryopteris dilatata – Broad Buckler Fern
- Dryopteris filix-mas – Male Fern
- Polypodium interjectum – Intermediate Polypody
- Polypodium vulgare s.s – Polypody sensus stricta
- * Polypodium s.l – Polypodies
- * Polystichum setiferum – Soft Shield fern
- Pteridium aquilinum – Bracken
Plant hunting is helped immeasurably by a bit of homework before you set out and equally with more homework even after you think you know what you’ve found. So this rather grand list was easily got by searching the accessible-to-the-public list and ticking off the ferns (Pteridophytes! As my mother used to say “the P is silent as in bathing” . So it turns out that in the little corner of High Mendip where we’re camping, there are 13 fern species (3 are hybrids – only separable by experts with microscopes) and yesterday in our short walk we found five of them – the starred names which are in the photographs clockwise from top left. None of them rare but some, much more common on the limestone rocks hereabouts – environment is a huge thing for plants. Whilst you might think that finding 38% of the available species isn’t bad for a half mile walk down a bridleway, they’re just the ordinary common species. The rarest fern that could conceivably be found near here is the Limestone Fern, but collectors are still capable of uprooting and stealing rare plants so their exact locations are withheld from general access.
The walk was exactly as planned on Monday. Cross the road and walk 250 yards to the entrance of a bridleway; walk very slowly down it as far as Priddy Pool, photographing any interesting plants, and then – depending on the weather, walk on to the churchyard and the limestone walls near Swildons Hole and then across the village green to the pub. The weather, though, was ferocious. The little spring expedition in our imagination actually brought with it 50 mph gusts of freezing wind and occasional pellets of sleet that felt as if they were lacerating our faces. 1000 feet of altitude makes a huge difference.
Down in the bridleway we were pretty much sheltered from the worst of it, and I got some good photographs of the crozier stage of some ferns as they emerge. They are wonderfully sculptural. We also found two very common flowering plants which were quite hard to identify. Yellow Archangel ought to be easy enough, but this one had silvery white spots on the leaves and so I used a bit of internet AI and chased it down to subspecies – probably a garden escape but it seemed fully naturalised.
Priddy Pool – and I mean the pool that adjoins Nine Barrows Lane is a truly magical place. There’s a certain ambiguity about the name because the plural – Priddy Pools refers to a couple of larger ponds in the Mineries nearby, now a nature reserve but once a lead mining area. My Priddy Pool – the only one named on the OS map – holds the water which subsequently runs underground at Swildons Hole. On July 10th 1968 we’d had two months worth of rain in two days, three thousand houses were flooded, eight people died and 24 buses were abandoned on the streets; and Swildon’s Hole took so much floodwater that the entire upper series was rearranged and the old 40 foot pitch (shaft) disappeared. Cavers who entered after the flood found an altogether different cave. It occurs to me that Priddy Pool, far from being an ancient natural formation may have been altered by 20th Century cavers to assist rescues when the cave was flooded. There’s certainly some stonework on the boundary with Nine Barrows Lane that was built there by someone. But now it’s just a lovely place to watch and listen to birds. Of course it could be a buddle pit or a sheepwash – someone must know.
Then as we came out on to Townsend we spotted a Forget me Not. Exactly as I had done with the Yellow Archangel I rather dismissed it as a garden escape with a toss of the head and curl of the lip – but I photographed it anyway because it was growing wild in a shady verge. Back in the campervan I looked up the Myosotis family in the Book of Stace and discovered that there are loads of them and that my suspicion of nursery bred plants was a bit over egged because there are ten legitimate wildies; three of them rare but the others, although they get grown in gardens often escape back into the wild. Another handy ID shortcut was to go back into the Distribution database and see how many of Forget me Nots have ever been seen in my grid square. That reduced the number from ten, to seven and then to an easily manageable two which were so different it was easy to choose the right one. By the time we reached Townsend our fingers were white and we were shivering, so we wandered back to the campervan and turned the heating up to tropical so we could properly enjoy a bottle of Provençal rosé with our sandwiches.
On the left the Wood Forget me Not – Myosotis sylvatica, and on the right Yellow Archangel – Lamiastrum galeobdolon ssp. argenatum
Anyway; notwithstanding the weather – which has been awful – wandering the bosky dells wasn’t the only reason for coming here. We needed to test out all the systems in the campervan to make sure it’s ready for the summer and happily – aside from a lousy WiFi signal which is only just about workable, the van is good. We, on the other hand, are sitting in it in the midst of a cloud with visibility down to 100 yards.
