Mynydd Garthmaelwg

On Saturday we had a family excursion to this mixed woodland, also known locally as Smaelog or Smilog, or just plain old Llantrisant Forest. The kids soon lost interest in looking for mushrooms and spent a fair while mucking about climbing on logs, which gave me some time for bryo recording. This part of RCT is seriously under-recorded and the two main tetrads covering the forest, ST08H and ST08C, had only 24 and 4 bryo taxa recorded respectively.

We walked alongside a large clearfell which proved rather good, with a small rotten log covered in Nowellia curvifolia and a few small cushions of Leucobryum growing on humus. As Barry and Charles have noted in earlier blog posts, the relative lengths of the upper and lower parts of the leaves proved unhelpful in determining the species due to the variability of this feature. But like Barry and Charles I was able to take a leaf section to confirm it was, as expected, L. juniperoideum.

 

On a trackside bank were some good patches of Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus, an uncommon species in south-east Glamorgan. It's a big forest and I'm sure there'll be plenty of other bryophytes to discover. I look forward to returning.