Midden unhidden

wells I have found I suspected there had once been a 19th century school there.

Possibly an old hamlet or village and this was the chosen place to leave all their junk prior to the advent of bin men.

I’m not sure what I expected to hear back from the owners of such a find. Would they call in Time Team? Dedicate a room of their house to become a museum? Would it provide a new revenue stream for any nearby businesses in the form of guided archaeology, sea glass and crockery tours?

Sea glass and beach combing are international businesses these days. Granted, most of the tours are not mainstream, but surely that just makes starting one more attractive?

There is great interest from countries abroad such as America and Australia, where there is not such a long history of making glass and pottery. But I had no reply from my excited email to the owner of the land. Each time I returned I half expected to see a swarm of activity but nothing. Truth be told if I had seen a group of mud larkers digging away I would have felt a bit peeved to be kept out of the loop. But it’s going to take more than one middle-aged woman with a sharp stone to dig out all the booty. Just to be clear I am not talking about East Beach at Lyme, which is a wellknown beachcombing favourite…

The trouble with lichen is that there are so many

I first took an interest in lichens circa 1966 when I bought my five-shilling copy of The Observer’s Book of Lichens. The poor colour printing of the time and preponderous of black and white images made the book impossible to use and I simply gave up. Half a century later my interest was rekindled by a friend who is highly knowledgeable on the subject. Even with the essential loupe (a small, highpowered magnifying glass), my nice microscope, a better book (Lichens. An

JOHN WRIGHT is a naturalist and forager who lives in rural West Dorset. He has written eight books, four of which were for River Cottage. He wrote the award-winning Forager’s Calendar and in 2021 his Spotter’s Guide to Countryside Mysteries was published.

Illustrated Guide to the British and Irish Species by Frank S. Dobson) and the excellent and encouraging website provided by the British Lichen Society, it is still not easy, but I can now name a dozen or so species with some confidence. Unfortunately, with 1,800 lichens in Britain, there is some way to go. Despite my talking about ‘species’, a lichen is not a single species. It is a minimum of two that live in mutually advantageous symbiosis: a fungus that forms the structure, while a ‘photobiont’ in the form of a green alga or, more rarely, a cyanobacterium, provides the food by photosynthesis.