David

Cramp balls – presumably they were thought to cure the condition, not cause it – are sometimes also called the coal fungus, of King Alfred’s cakes. They are quite common, as the variant names hints. Whatever their medicinal properties, the dried fungi were used as tinder when starting fires by rubbing sticks or bashing stones together.

A squirrel in the riverside gardens by the chain ferry in Stratford on Avon, looking really determined that nothing was going to part it from the chestnut it was carrying.

The Stratford upon Avon Local Nature Reserve again – actually the car park at the town centre end of the reserve. The car park has some old and gnarled willows on its margin. Growing on one of the willows, climbing up the trunk and the boughs, were these mushrooms, Although they rare distinctive, I’m not sure what species they are.

A row of liquidambar planted on the approaches to the theatre in Stratford on Avon make their most dramatic show in early November. They had lost quite a lot more of their leaves the day after these pictures were taken.

Honey fungus growing ay and near the base of a willow tree. In a few years, the tree will need to be felled before it crashes down in a winter gale: the fungus is eating it from within.

These yellow fieldcaps were growing under a huge spreading willow tree, a little further along the footpath from the mushrooms in the previous couple of days’ posts.