Alice Foxley: Take a Closer Look

Shaggy ink caps, those common mushrooms of wayside and field margin, are the fruiting bodies of the fungus Coprinus comatus and have a fascinating life cycle. Over a period of one to two days the gills of the emergent white spears roll up into themselves and dissolve entirely into a spore-filled liquid that drips to the ground. This quietly spectacular process of enzymic self-digestion or deliquescence is signified by a colour transition from white to black. In their pure white state the mushrooms are edible if cooked. The black fluid can be processed for use as ink.

‘Bring to the study of geology a mind which can illuminate with its own light the dark history of the past’. Mary A Johnstone, Elements of Geology (1927).

Deposits resulting from fast-moving, sediment-laden flows that travel down the submerged slopes of lakes and oceans follow a specific sequence known as the Bouma Sequence. Such currents, triggered by events like earthquakes or tsunamis, carry vast amounts of clastic sediments that settle out in layers progressively finer from bottom to top as velocity decreases. The geological record of this process gives us the sedimentary stone Turbidie. The fine to course grading of the banded stone is a defining feature. If exposed to weather the stone tends to split at the interface between fine and course sediment. In some places this reveal a familiar sight – it is that scaled pattern that forms on a sandy beach as the tide recedes. Such fragments of ‘beach’ are as incongruous a sight in the uplands of the Yorkshire Dales as the fossilised Sea Lillies.