Sandy stiltballs, a very rare fungus – the current record stands at exactly 200 confirmed sightings ever in Britain. Even for a fungus, it looks as strange as it is rare. The tall stem resembles a series of long splinters compressed together, and already beginning to fray slightly. At the top what looks like damp sand compressed into a ball is actually a mass of spores. It prefers very dry sandy soil (half-hidden under hedgerows in the ones I’ve seen). So there are clusters of sandy-coloured fruiting bodies in a patch of sandy-coloured fallen spores, growing out of slightly paler sandy-coloured soil.
I recently posted about a patch of these stiltballs which I discovered growing by a lane in south Shropshire in 2011, and how they were last seen in 2014. Lo and behold, another patch, just a few miles distant. When these pictures were taken in late August, there were forty or so fruiting bodies by a south Shropshire roadside .