Dechmont Moss Wood

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 24 Jun 2022

As with all woods, the fun starts when you leave the paths, or path in the case of this small wood, as there is only one, that leads from the road to a hard path running alongside the railway. Due to the fact that the road is busy and there are regular trains, the 'Blair Witch' effect is drastically reduced. The wood gets denser the further East you go, and there is a lot of deadwood kicking about. I'm fairly sure I have mentioned this in write-ups before, but an infuriating thing about the Woodland Trust's brilliant online documents about their woods is that they split their urban woodlands into 'compartments' but never actually state where each compartment is located. This is probably 10a or 10b, and called Dechmont Moss West Wood, increasingly broadleafed due to gradual felling of 1970s-planted conifer. I have been looking into ferns lately - it's akin to learning a foreign language. One thing I have discovered rather late in life, all things considered, is that most ferns have little dots on the underside of their leaves. These are spores which eventually fall off and due to some bewildering process eventually make new baby ferns. The spots are called sori (singular sorus), and the darker they are the closer they are to falling off. They can be seen next to the birch tree on the right of the picture, and the sori of the oldest leaves are already darkening.

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