Ferry Woods

We parked the car this morning along the road to Littleferry and followed a - to us - new path into Ferry Woods, which should have brought us straight onto the links. The path rose and fell across a series of low ridges separated by....

....open 'valleys' covered in moss, lichen and ling. These features seem to me to be old storm beaches, the ridges of coarse shingle, the valleys sandier, deposited by the sea parallel to the coast in the 10,000 years or so since the last ice age.

As expected, the path brought us to the links, separated from them by an area of gorse (locally called whin) and, unfortunately, an old barbed wire fence which is only broken in a few places. Once through it and across the links, we found....

....the tide high and eating at the sand of the coastline.

So we walked the links southwards towards Littleferry, passing these trees, all that remain of a copse which once included a few palms of some sort, leading to the nearby section of beach being referred to as Palm Beach.

We re-entered the woods much further south and headed back parallel to the ridges, finding dead trees which were probably deciduous and the last remains of such woodland as there might have been before the monotonous and rather dark pine forestry was planted.

The fungi that have been 'in bloom' over the last few weeks are over their best, this one looking about as old as, at times, I feel.