Helvella crispa and the White Fog.

There are a few surprises down the old holloway. The fog came down this morning after a brief, warming sunrise, thickened and settled. I cannot see the hill. On these barely-gets-light days the earth is a painting. The ground I walk on is a chaotic mandala of leaves in rich, golden colours, a patina of butter, toffee, fudge and caramel.

The holloway is bordered by a deep ditch full of water running off the down and already, I mistake the grey lane I have left behind for trailing smoke or floodwater.

My first surprise is a small stand of pristine and beautiful fungus.

The elegant, strange and sculptural white saddle fungus looks like a candle that might have puttered in the casement of Wuthering Heights, the wax melting in shapes formed by a strong draught from a wild moor; the stem of the fungus is deeply fluted like an elaborate ionic column and the ‘saddle’ on top convoluted. A side-saddle perhaps?

It is more like a wrung handkerchief, or a crumpled white peony. Perfectly formed curls, curlicues and roses arc and project from it as if from a fascinator worn to a wedding. Amongst the slew of brown mud, hoof prints and bright leaf litter, they look as if they are made of white, unsullied marble or porcelain.

I take two just steps forward and a woodcock, that must have been sitting tight, right under my nose, explodes up from the earth, shedding leaves as if it were made of them and jinks off. Had I thought to look, would I have spotted it? Probably not. Not unless I’d seen the bird’s black, buckthorn-berry eye, its dark onyx glinting through its cryptic, brown, leaf-mould camouflage.

When I reach the hill, negotiating the deeply churned mud that the shoot and the tractors have made on the bridlepath, the cloud has lifted slightly. I walk on the open down, below a veil of cloud. The clatter and collective whumpf of wings alert me that a large flock of woodpigeons have taken off just above me, in the fog. Here, on this broad expanse of long, tufty grass, seedheads and the leaves of wild, calcareous plants, a lamplight glow comes up from the hazel wood and the hawthorn and blackthorn scrub and all their mingled leaves on the ground. They emanate a butter-coloured light that diffuses and refracts off the low cloud and everything warms again.

A sheltered, thorny fold in the down is filled with chacking fieldfares and voles run from my feet into the insulated castle sanctuaries of hollowed out anthills. The discovery of the porcelain-white saddle fungus and its elegant, curlicued candles seems to have set a glow in the window of this world.