Spore

Second week of September to the last week of November

One wood, nine mornings, six people at a time

Three hours, slowly, in eleven hectares of beech and oak that has not been cleared since the war. You will not come home with a full basket. You will come home able to name eleven things and certain about four of them.

See the nine dates
A pale mushroom cap opened wide in green moss.
A single small mushroom on a mossy log. Sunlight coming through the trunks of a beech wood.

Three kinds of morning

Same wood, same guide, three different reasons to be in it. Nobody is allowed on the second one without having done the first.

Mist between dark conifers early in the morning.

The first walk

Four things you can eat and four that will put you in hospital, and how to tell them apart in bad light. We pick almost nothing. Most of the three hours is spent looking at what a spore print is for.

£38 · three hours · nine of the nine dates

Bare trees in heavy fog at the edge of a wood.

The second walk

For people who have done the first one and want the twenty species nobody bothers with. Slower, wetter, further in, and it ends with everything laid out on a sheet and argued over.

£46 · four hours · five of the nine dates

A hand holding a small flowering stem in low sunlight.

The kitchen one

Two hours in the wood and two at a stove in the village hall. Whatever we found, plus a bag of chestnuts, plus the six recipes that make the difference between a curiosity and a dinner.

£64 · four hours · three of the nine dates

The nine dates

Sat 13 September · first walktwo places

Sat 20 September · first walkfull

Sun 28 September · kitchenfour places

Sat 4 October · first walkfull

Sat 11 October · second walkone place

Sun 19 October · kitchensix places

Sat 1 November · first walksix places

Sat 15 November · second walkthree places

Sun 30 November · kitchensix places

Six people, never seven. We walk in rain and we do not walk in wind — a beech wood in a gale is the one genuinely dangerous place on this page.

Read the three rules first
A path running away through tall autumn trees.

Three rules

1

Nothing goes in a mouth

Not on the walk, not on the way home, not the one you are sure about. Everything gets looked at twice at the sheet, and the sheet is at the end.

2

One basket, not a bag

Open weave, carried flat. A plastic bag turns a good find into a wet grey mess in forty minutes and takes the spores with it.

3

Half of what is there

We leave more than we take, always, and we never take the small ones. This wood has to still be worth walking into in November.

If you are pregnant, on blood thinners, or cooking for somebody who is, say so at the start and the kitchen walk changes slightly. It is not a problem and it is much easier to know beforehand.

A small brown mushroom low in bright green moss.

One guide

Thirty-one seasons in this wood, a field mycology certificate that took four years, and a standing arrangement with the poisons unit at the county hospital, who have never had to take a call about anybody from here.

There is no second guide, which is why there are nine dates and not thirty, and why six is six.

Where we meet