Nant Cae-dudwg

In February I made a start on ST09W by visiting the spoil tips north of Cilfynydd. In a blog post at the time (see here) I mentioned that I was saving the Nant Cae-dudwg (in the same tetrad) for when I had a little more time, and being lucky enough to have a few spare hours this morning I thought it was about time I paid this area a visit.

 

I walked the length of the footpath within ST0992, which runs along the north bank of the stream through both wooded and open areas. After feeling a bit rusty for the first hour (I hadn't done any square bashing for 6 weeks) things picked up and by the time I'd reached the NE corner of the monad a good list of taxa had been accumulated, albeit with nothing of special interest. The highlights up to this point were a few plants of Colura calyptrifolia on willow (the spindly diagonal trunk in front of the holly in the photo below) and quite a lot of Physcomitrium pyriforme (photo) on a ditch bank alongside the access track.

 

I was about to head back but a stony flush in the woodland across the stream caught my eye so I waded across for a look. There was no obvious excitement here, but nearby a rotten ash log was covered in Nowellia curvifolia and Riccardia palmata (photo).

A few metres further on another rotten log had more Riccardia and quite a lot of Trichocolea tomentella, which extended beyond the log over quite a large area, looking rather fetching among the marsh marigolds.

75 species were recorded in the field and I still have plenty of samples to go through, so along with the almost entirely different flora of the coal tips this tetrad will now be up to a pretty respectable total.