Looking at Toads Hole Valley when driving by on the bypass, I’ve always been intrigued by the vast area of scrubby ground scribbled with bike tracks on the Hove side of the road. Recently the scrub has grown and the bike tracks started to disappear. A planning application has been made for a large development here so the scrub and dormouse and hedgehog inhabitants seem doomed. I was glad to have started to explore it but sorry not to have visited earlier. The area feels rather abandoned but has a special, secret quality, the dense woods, unusually humid for this part of the world, (the aquifer that provides water for Hove is under this land), and the maze of paths lined with chalk grassland flowers absorbing the hazy sun.
After more than a month of dry weather we had steady rain last Sunday and an overcast sky on Monday made for perfect mossing conditions. The bus took ages, (no wonder my children chose to walk, spending their bus fare on curly wurly’s, when they went to secondary school up this way), and the sun had emerged when I reached the top of Hangleton Way.
The area is access land but, apart from a gravelled path skirting the northern tip of the land it is fairly impenetrable now. Not completely impossible though and a half hidden sign by a dewpond needed pushing through the Cow Parsley and Nettles to an overgrown pond full of Yellow Iris. Thick woody stems of Clematis vitalba had Cryphaea heteromalla and Myrocoliopsis minutissima growing along woody stems and a wooden fence was topped with Brachythecium rutabulum and Bryum capillare.
By the gravel path an Ash with dieback was dotted with Frullania heteromalla and Syntrichia laevipila.
Narrow paths led into the woodland and descended steeply into a dense, humid mesh of trees, Cow Parsley and Bramble. Thamnobryum alopecurum was detaching from the woodland floor and rolling down the path while Eurhynchium striatum was hanging on firmly.
The air became more humid lower down and near the bypass. A fiercely spiny Hawthorn was covered in the oblong fruiting bodies of Radula complanata, like a shingled roof but green and upside down! One tiny cushion of Orthotrichum pulchellum was just in reach- it seems to like to grow about 6ft from the ground, but maybe that’s just where I look!
Right next to the road an abandoned mountain bike track was mossy with Pohlia melanodon and Dicranella howei. It took a few tries to get a decent leaf section that showed the cling-on cells of the Dicranella.
A few, faded, inclined capsules flagged up some Fissidens incurvus on steep soil by the path and Zygodon conoideus grew in a line down a thick Ash trunk.
As the woodland thinned and gave way to low scrub with clear areas of flower-rich grassland a ditch was edged with Calliergonella cuspidata which also grew in the grassy areas along with Pseudoscleropodium purum and Homalothecium lutescens. Numerous active ants nest were a bit too lively for moss growth but there was a small clump of Bryum rubens on one.
TQ20T now has 55 taxa recorded, an increase of four from this short visit.
Sussex Bryophytes 