The Battle of Bossenden Wood

Bossenden Wood is a woodland area on the Western side of the Blean Woods complex around Canterbury. It is infamous as the site of the last pitched battles fought on English soil (albeit by small numbers of men on both sides).

In the battle Tom Courtenay (aka Sir William Courtenay) was killed with 8 or 9 others of his activists, together with two government soldiers (1 by "friendly" fire). Tom Courtenay had set himself up as a leader of a local revolt, attracting local fairly desperate malcontents deeply affected by the withdrawal of charitable payments, and the loss of farm-work due to the rapidly increasing mechanisation of farms, and the consequent threat of the workhouse for them and their families. There was no local charitable giving to support them, as the area was extra-parochial, with no church and no school for the children to go to. The judges were relatively lenient with the survivors, expressing a degree of sympathy for their grievous situation.

This is the Crooked Oak, a local landmark at Bossenden Wood. David Shire said that the name probably represents the summit of the hill where a succession of one or several oaks have got wind-damaged over many years. It seemed to be more like Quercus petraea than Quercus robur, purely from the apparently petiolate leaves.

In the picture above you can see the point where the large branch pictured below has been ripped from, apparently quite some considerable time ago.

The general vegetation around appears to be at least in part Sweet Chestnut, Castanea sativa, an Archeaophyte species, commonly  managed as coppice or "spring" (spring is sprung??), known in the Domesday book as "silvia minutia". Coppice may also be written coppy, coppis, coppse, copse, copy.

Along the old woodbank, this tree was considered to be a "stub" or "stubb" perhaps acting as a "cant" or "panel" marker according to David Shire, which it may well be, cut at about waist height. Alternative terms for the "panel" are "sale", "fell" or "barrow". However as far as I can see, with my very limited experience, from reading Rackham, it is just as likely to simply be a boundary marker. This tree is a Hornbeam, a very useful marker species, I could only take a wild guess as to how old it was:

This the same stub, from a different angle, noting some failure of regrowth, perhaps of an older coppice stool, perhaps indicating that the creation of the stub form of the tree came rather later:

The asexual stage of an Ascocoryne sp on a birch stump, possibly Ascocoryne sarcoides.

And here is some Candle-snuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon. in general it seems to be very variably branched. These individuals are quite dumpily rounded, but you also get stag's horn shapes or quite narrowly rounded tips. The bodies should release either white conidia (when you tap them?) or black ascospores:

There were very good numbers of fungi across the site, including these pretty dark flesh coloured mushrooms growing amongst the moss on this tree stump (pictures uncropped and cropped):

We also found these, which I think are Sulphur Tuft, Hypholoma fasciculare, or one of its relatives: 

A quiet and muddy Dene Park

Late on in the afternoon I took the Western boundary path of Dene Park and had a look at the boundary features of the different paths and component woods. Birds singing included Great Tits, Blue Tits, Long-tailed Tits and Robins. Magpies and Wood Pigeons were also noted.

Working on the convention that at a wood boundary there should be a bank with a ditch to the outside of the bank (so that the ditch spoil gets thrown inwards onto the woodsman's property) the boundary on the outside of the wood appears to be facing outwards on the inner side of this track!

The sign that claims the track as Fairlawne property is therefore apparently accurate, at least at this point! Here is a traditional hornbeam stub a little further along the same bank, where the bluebells appear more profuse or earlier on the bank itself than on the lower ground further into the wood.

I followed the track around, which dog-legs around in a curve to avoid the acute straight lines of the property boundary of the forest lodge. The ditches would seem to indicate straight lines to tie in with the existing outer fence boundaries of the property - in other words the track and the current wood edge seems to have seeped out from the sharp angle to form a more gentle curve and "fill in" the corner of the Fairlawne field. The bank along the second line is lined with oaks, not sweet chestnut.

I then followed the track further on the drive along the edge of the old wood and around the corner, with what may be a newer section of wood to the outside of the track which included sweet chestnut, a sallow and, further on, some planted horse chestnuts. The sallow bark is very broken up, but attractive in its own way,

This planting contrasted with the section to the inside of the track, which had chestnut coppice and then some quite good beeches in it further along. The older section had a good really substantial wood bank fronting on to the track, but without a good line of edging trees, just a boundary to the sweet chestnut coppice. I wonder why this bank is so sharp and deep as it drops down to the track.

In the horse-chestnut section of the wood to the outside of the track, there was a half-buried branch of unknown origin. This is typical habitat for the scarlet elf cup, Sarcoscypha coccinea, which I stumbled across on my second traverse. It had about five fruiting bodies visible, generally a bit worse for wear due to the ravages of time and maggots. I don't think this fungus has been officially reported as present at Dene Park as yet - its not on the species lists I have seen to date.

This fungus, sensu latu, is found across the Northern hemisphere, and is frequent in the UK from early winter through to early spring. The scarlet inner surface, broken edge, outer tomentum and short stipe were all found, but the spores with their elliptical fruiting bodies and oil droplets are microscopic and were not sought today. I must get that microscope up and running!

The Horsechestnuts themselves looked to be in deep trouble, perhaps from a combination of Cameraria, likely rabbit damage and possible blight.

The tree's bark above this is in a terrible way, cracking and peeling away,

and this is an interesting sap run on the same or a different horse chestnut, which could attract some hoverflies later in the year perhaps,

Still further along, the track becomes a bridleway and again there is a bank to the right hand side indicating an original wood boundary.

On the track something appears to have ripped off a few twigs with sallow catkins. I wonder what could have been responsible? Earlier on there was also a collection of freshly broken open and chewed up sweet chestnut fragments on the mossy ground.