Waterfall Walk

A fine day, not too warm, and with a few hours available led me to visit a site I’d not been to before in spite of it being only a few miles away from my home as the kite flies.  Arthur had told me it was worth getting to and he had visited it with Sam in May 2004 so I knew what I was likely to see and there was one particular moss I was interested in refinding.

The walk starts from the now-derelict Dyffryn Castell on the main road and heads SE through the farm at the foot of the hill.  Then a slog up the track before branching off on a tiny footpath across the moorland until one of the lakes called Llynnoedd Ieuan  is reached:

This lake itself has so far proved unremarkable bryologically, as a previous visit with Tim Rayner had shown, but there are another two lakes to explore another day.  

Pressing on across the moorland, the land suddenly drops away and the small stream drops over the edge in a spectacular waterfall.

By dropping down through the forestry and then working back up the stream, it’s not too difficult to reach the bottom of the falls.  Most of the rock is clearly acidic and, although it’s possible to work up the edge of the series of cascades that make up the waterfall (unlikely as it looks on the photo), the bryophytes tend to be very common things like Scapania and Marsupella. It's not a very big stream and may well dry up completely on occasion and it also faces south.  But there are a few pockets of strongly calcareous rock at the bottom which are easily detected by the presence of huge cushions of Tortella tortuosa with a few patches of Pohlia cruda.

 

Then at the bottom of a few of these rocks are cavities where the delightful Isopterygiopsis pulchella grows, a plant I’d not previously seen in the county.  A few setae are visible in the photo for this is a monoicous moss, unlike some of its look-alikes.

 Associated bryophytes here were all common things like Heterocladium flaccidum and Mnium hornum, all carefully checked of course.

 

 

I didn’t have time to thoroughly explore the site but I managed to add a few more mosses and liverworts to Sam’s extensive list and then it was back across the moorland with a few Wheatears for company.