Wolsingham, Weardale: Snails, fungi and countless insects will thrive on this ash, which has joined other fallen specimens from decades ago
There’s a carpenter’s-workshop fragrance of freshly splintered timber in the air. Last night the first high winds of autumn brought down an ash tree, now lying across the footpath. The Weardale Way is narrow here, between woodland and river, so we are forced to skirt around the obstacle by climbing the steep escarpment. The ground underfoot is soft, cushioned by decades of ankle-deep leaf mould releasing its rich aroma of fungal decay.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, goes the old saying, never more apt than when applied to fallen timber that’s left to rot, to be colonised by host of opportunist organisms. The newly stricken ash is about to begin its afterlife, in a cycle of decay as a succession of fungi moves in, secreting enzymes, softening, digesting. An old section of fallen trunk that carried a crop of stump puffballs last year is now covered with serried ranks of sheath woodtuft, taking their turn to feed on the fallen. Some casualties from previous gales are so old and rotten that they are merely cylindrical, moss-carpeted hummocks that crumble to the touch.
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