Ox Mountains, Mayo, September 2026
Woohoo, two Fungi Friday posts on the trot!
This is an addition to the post I published last week about lichens on a walled trackway in Mayo:
That blog was really interesting to write and research (in addition to the meditative experience of taking the photos, of course).
This one is from another day further along the trackway when I spotted this magnifique lichen growing on a boulder in the wall. But first of all, another usnea lichen, which I’m not quite able to ID at the moment:
It’s not oakmoss, but I probably needed some macro photos to look more closely (obvs). These are phone pics. Now to the coral lichen!
As you can see the lichen is growing directly from the rock. I don’t know what type of rock this is, but I do know there is a lot of gneiss in the Ox Mountains. It’s a gneiss place…
The tendrils of the lichen are very fine, as can be seen in comparison to my hand.
Zooming in a bit more, you can see where the lichen gets the name of ‘coral’. The scientific name is Sphaerophorus globosus. I’m not sure what the globosus refers to, but the American name is globe ball lichen.
It is a rather branchy lichen – I wonder what it looks like a few months later, if it grows for that long.
Next time we’ll be back in Sussex, along the South Downs Way.
Thanks for reading.
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