Ohio

Mainly Mushrooms

Monday 14th October, 2013.

In her email on Sunday, Dorothy suggested a Monday walk “ . . . from the Sulby Claddagh and up Narradale and back through the woods.”  

This is one of our “useful” walks.  Not too long if the weather is iffy or we are tired, and conveniently situated half way between our glen and Dorothy’s home.  Also there are three routes up to the Lezayre tops that start near the Claddagh, on the banks of the Sulby River, so it is possible to vary the walk slightly.  The only snag is that it is difficult to find anything new to photograph or describe.

The forecast was for “Bright spells but also a small risk of an isolated shower” . . . with winds up to 25 mph.  There were clouds over Cronk Sumark as we set out, but no showers arrived during the morning.  Not many bright spells either.

The Narradale road is part of an old route from Sulby to Laxey.  Thinking of old routes reminds me that I may have confused Slieau Ree with Slieau Ruy in last week’s post about the Red Road when I wrote “I once read that a hill called Slieau Ree (Red Mountain) has that name because of the heather”.  I can’t remember where I read about Slieau Ree being named on account of the colour of the flowering heather.  It is never a good plan to trust one’s memory (or anything that you read on the internet!).   According to our Manx dictionaries Ree means King and Ruy means Red . . .  but the waters are muddied slightly by the Illustrated Encyclopaedia which gives the English translation of Slieau Ree as Heather Mountain!  


Dorothy and Trevor arrived back from Ireland towards the end of last week.   They had a fantastic time and Dorothy claimed to be shattered after too many late nights.  But that was hard to believe as she shot up the Narradale Road like the proverbial scalded cat!  I was relieved when she stopped briefly to chat with a friend and I had a chance to catch up.

A little further up the hill I stopped for another brief “photo rest” and took this photo of a little patch of sunlight illuminating half of Mount Karrin.

The wind wasn’t as strong as I had expected but I could hear it singing through the stay wires supporting this aerial.  The Island is a curious mixture of ancient sites and modern technology.

We eventually reached the gate onto the moors - nearly 700 feet higher than the Ginger Hall where we started the climb up the hill.  I like to measure elevation in feet because it sounds so much more impressive than metres.  The Narradale road  is "good exercise", in other words long and tiring, but at least we didn’t have to scramble over compacted snow like we did on the first of April.

We followed the path at the edge of the moors and climbed up a bank to avoid the puddle where we encountered a long jumping/swallow diving sheep last autumn.  The sheep panicked as it raced past us and ended up doing a memorable bellyflop into the middle of the puddle.  Then our route turned downhill and followed a farm road between fields to Ohio Plantation.

Last autumn we walked through Ohio hoping to find photogenic fungi and found very little even though I expected fungi to flourish in the damp conditions we had last summer and autumn.  On Monday we were luckier.  The fungi must have preferred the warmer weather this year – or perhaps our timing was better.  We were hardly inside the gate to the plantation when Dorothy stopped to photograph a rather ugly mushroom.  Then, just few yards down a side track, on a bank above a small ditch we came across a whole group of bright red Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria).  The  common name comes from the old practice of soaking bits of the toxic toadstools in milk to stupefy flies.  Tim took this photo . . .

. . . and then I climbed up the bank to get a closer shot.

There were a lot of nondescript brownish mushrooms under the conifers.  I think they are the same as those we have been seeing during our dog walks on Skyhill.  I tried to identify them from the photos in my mushroom book but had no success.  Then I tried the internet with an equal lack of success.  Fungi are particularly difficult to identify.   A large proportion of the photos on one website were marked as “waiting identification” so it appears as though the experts have difficulty too.

As we walked down through the conifers, we passed more Fly Agaric on the bank above the main track.  These had been nibbled.  Probably by slugs.  I have read that reindeer have a great liking for these mushrooms which have an intoxicating and hallucinogenic effect.  I wonder whether they have any effect on slugs . . . and whether it would be possible to notice if a slug was drunk or having a drug induced “trip”.  

Further down the track I came across another ugly mushroom, rather like the one up by the gate.  I think it is probably a variety of Boletus or Suillus as there are no gills on the undersurface of the cap. 

Near the bottom of the plantation were some clusters of mushrooms, which looked uncomfortably similar to honey fungus, near the stump of a dead conifer.   Honey fungus is a problem in the glens, feeding on roots and sometimes killing vulnerable trees and shrubs.

The last fungi that we photographed were these tiny ones - almost orange in colour and rather pretty against a background of green moss.  This is another of Tim’s photos.  

At the side of the path below the plantation, I noticed these nearly-ripe holly berries.  Living in the sub-tropics before coming to the Island, I naively thought that holly trees would be loaded with berries at Christmas.  Sadly, for the Christmas decoration industry especially, they ripen in autumn and by Christmas the blackbirds have eaten most of the berries.

Further down the hill we passed Ballamanaugh, set in immaculate gardens below Cronk Sumark.

Between the road and the boundary walls of the Ballamanaugh garden is a the stream where I saw the toxic giant hogweed plant in June.  I checked to see whether the gardeners from Ballamanaugh had bothered to remove the plant.  They hadn’t.  The dead flower stem (at least eight feet long) had fallen across the stream after shedding its seeds.  So there may be a whole thicket of giant hogweed plants by the stream next year.


We were nearing the end of the walk when I finally came across one tree near the ford which dared to be different and don autumn colours before the others.