Whose boot?

This afternoon I spent a fascinating couple of hours at Old Sulehay Forest with Alex and the dogs. He has to produce a poster detailing the history of a local woodland, and today we went out to his chosen site to see what features we could find. We found lots of evidence of past woodland management, in the form of ancient coppice stools, pollards, areas of old planting, boundary banks and ditches and old stone walls.

The south-western sector of Sulehay is called Kings Oaks, where the trees were formerly reserved for the Royal Navy. The timber was taken via the Nene to Wisbech and on to Chatham shipbuilding yards. Large trees were again removed during the First World War. There are still some amazing old oak coppice stools in this area.

In the north western part of the wood we found an old surfaced trackway with a double avenue of limes on each side, but we haven't managed to find any reference to that yet - it almost looks like an 18th century feature but could be older.

During the Second World War, servicemen and women were stationed in huts in and around the northern part of Sulehay and we found plenty of remains including old toilets and cast iron cisterns, buckets, old polish tins and perhaps most poignant of all, this single boot, still in amazingly good shape after seventy years exposed to the elements!

For the first time this year there were reasonable numbers of fungi including wood blewits, Mycena pura and this rather splendid, if slug-eaten Boletus luridiformis. I just hope we stay frost free for a while to allow further species to emerge...