The private estates of Angmering messed up my plans again this week. A road which joins a public footpath which leads to Poling across a golf course is barred to walkers. Traffic to the golf club is permitted so I might have got away with it wearing an Argyle jumper and baseball hat instead of beanie and backpack! I walked up to Angmering village instead and took a footpath that skirted the church and grazed more private roads and some well maintained thatch.
After a long stretch between wheat fields a wobbly stile crossed a rough track. The edges of the wheat field were almost moss free but the rough gravelly track was grouted with dried up Pseudocrossidium hornschuchianum and Bryum dichotomum.
Then a vast flat field with pea seedings just emerging gave no clues that this is the site of a Roman villa. It had obviously been mossy before it was ploughed as dried clumps of Funaria hygrometrica lay on the surface. There were smaller clumps of Dicranella schreberiana with round tubers. Blue-grey shards of flint looked like broken pottery, more willow pattern than Roman but I still kept picking bits up hoping to find a mosaic floor!
I still couldn’t see Poling Church hidden behind trees but could see the mature parkland of the golf course to the south. It looked as if it was lush with more variety than this route. I picked a speck of Streblotrichum convolutum var. commutatum from stone in a cattle poached wet meadow and a bit of Syntrichia montana on a wooden bridge over Black Ditch.
On the other side of the bridge some moss and lichen covered Poplars leant over still water. While negotiating some mud to reach the tree trunks I realised that the wet ground was covered in Riccia fluitans. Then looking across at the water saw a thinner mesh of thalli floating in small clusters. It wasn’t nearly as large a colony as the one Graeme Lyons found at Chailey in 2017 but the first time I have come across it since then. Suddenly this route didn’t seem so bad!
Looking at past records it seems to be more often found in early autumn but the recent wet weather must have stimulated it to grow. It has been recorded in 31 tetrads in Sussex and there is a cluster of records from the Adur valley, just north of this site. As it grows on still water, not a typical liverwort habitat, it is often found by botanists searching for aquatic vascular plants.
Bryophytes on Poplar included Syntrichia laevipila, Zygodon conoideus, Hypnum resupinatum and dark patches of Frullania dilatata.
A brick bridge was disappearing under Homalothecium sericeum and Rhynchostegiella tenella and encroaching brambles. A sandy corner of another arable field had a straight-leaved Dicranella with the bubble cells of D. howei.
The little church of St. Nicholas which dates from before the Norman Conquest, was surrounded by huge, sculpted Box trees. They may not be here for much longer as most were grey and dusty with Box blight. The rough bark of more Box that had been left to ramble near the gate was covered in Myriocoleopsis minutissima, Zygodon viridissimus and Orthotrichum diaphanum. Small, flat rosettes of Hennediella macrophylla grew on a damp earth path beneath these trees.
Turf was stuffed with a familiar mix of Rhytidiadelphus squarrosus, Plagiomnium undulatum and Calliergonella cuspidata. A miniscule colony of Leptobarbula berica grew on the north gutter of the church and a couple of decaying wooden crosses were topped with Dicranoweiissia cirrata.
On the homeward journey I failed again with the golf course route as excitable heffers were loitering by a stile. By the time I had passed the Riccia and taken a few more photos the heffers had moved on but it was too late to turn back.
TQ00M now has 53 taxa recorded from a start of 25, mostly recorded from a corner of woodland last year.
Sussex Bryophytes 