Thursday's walk, in clear conditions but with the temperature hovering around 5C which felt even colder in a chill wind, took us to the beach at Littleferry where a good proportion of the sand which usually forms the main beach had been removed by the recent easterlies.
The links - extensive areas of rough grassland which lie between the beach and the coniferous plantation - provided us with some interesting fungi, including....
....one which looked remarkably like a pitta bread that someone had dropped and....
....some of the largest puffballs we've seen, probably a giant puffball..
For a bit of colour we had plenty of these small fungi which I think are blackening waxcaps, the name deriving from their habit, as they develop, of turning from rich yellows and reds though oranges to brown and then a rather sad black.
Returning through the forestry the path leads over this elongated mound which is part of an old storm beach composed of sand on a substructure of cobbles. This seems to suit some fungi because, along the top....
....there were masses of a rich brown bolete fungus which....
....specialised in developing unusual contortions.
Also pushing up through the pine needles are what may be the first brittlegills, fungi of which we have, in the past, found large numbers.
Finally, we found the first slime mould in ages, this one going by the lovely name of wolf's milk slime.
Timelapse films of advancing and retreating tides are famillier, but what came to mind in your first photograph, is your commentry of the way the sand migrates according to the seasonal storm directions and currents. A long term project would be to locate a static camera to take low tide photographs and then run them as a film to show the advancing and retreating volume of sand. Oh to live by the coast!
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