There’s a story about Wardsend Cemetery, which may or may not be true.
Some years ago, few people visited the Victorian graveyard hidden away behind the Owlerton greyhound stadium, but it was popular at that time with a small group of homeless men, who liked a drink or two, and sometimes, at night or in bad weather, crept inside the cracked entrances of the grander tumbledown tombs to have a nap.
At dusk, near Halloween, an amateur historian and storyteller arrived at the cemetery with some eager young explorers, who’d booked onto her tour for an evening of ghost stories, based loosely on local legends and folklore.
As the stories progressed, they moved further into the graveyard until as night fell, and the final story ended, the group were deep in the trees, surrounded by gravestones. Whereupon (you can imagine), a wailing dishevelled ragged creature emerged from one of the tombs, the storyteller and her listeners fled never to return, and the ghost and his mates had a good laugh about it all for years to come.
Wardsend, burial site of almost 30,000 Sheffielders, is now cared for lovingly by the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery volunteers, but it still attracts people with an interest in the weird and wonderful. Fungi hunters, for example.
“That’s a good one,” said Ziggy Senkans, one of the fungi experts of the Sorby Natural History Society. “A brown roll rim. Up to 40 years ago, these were described as edible and quite tasty. But in fact we now know it has some nasty chemicals that can accumulate in the body and lead to symptoms like leukaemia. I believe they still eat it in parts of Europe, but it has caused a number of deaths.”
The 30 or so people round him nodded, and then looked down again to see what else they could find.
This is quite normal on a fungi walk, of which Ziggy does a dozen or so every autumn. (Coming up soon are the General Cemetery on 1st November, and the Porter Valley on 23rd November).
But walk is possibly the wrong term: in around 20 minutes at Wardsend, we’d travelled less than 100 yards, about ⅕ of a mile per hour. Understandable, because there was so much to see: a scaly earthball, a puffball, a russula, a yellow-staining knight, a brown birch bolete and then what appeared to be a twig, marvelled at by everyone, covered as it was with delicate curtain crust fungi.
Howard Bayley and Hugh Waterhouse from the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery directed the slow moving naturalists upwards, along a path the Friends had recently found and cleared, marked by cementation furnace ‘crozzle’ recycled by the original cemetery builders 160 years ago.
Young birch trees were now sprouting out of the path, which the Friends had left growing to provide handholds for visitors. Alongside were pink coloured deceivers, amethyst knights, tiny oysterling and bonnet mushrooms growing from twigs, waxcaps that first saw the light of day in grassland, now being overtaken by trees, frilly things that smelled of coconut or pear drops, and then suddenly, the traditional red and white toadstool from Enid Blyton books, the fly agaric.
“Wow! I’ve never seen one of those before,” said a younger mushroom hunter, phone camera in hand. Actually, fly agarics are pretty common, said Ziggy. The bright red mushroom flourishes in northern European woodlands, and is hallucinogenic, hence the association with all kinds of folklore.
Ziggy remarked that Scandinavian reindeer sometimes eat them, and some say the sight of spaced out deer from the far northern forests tripping along after a feast of fly agaric could have inspired stories of flying winter reindeer.
The Wardsend toadstools had been nibbled, Ziggy noted, by squirrels or mice, maybe. (If you look carefully on the forest floor, most red toadstools have bite marks of some kind, it seems). Would this lead to drug crazed squirrels, someone asked?
Different creatures have different stomachs, Ziggy observed. “It may have an effect on woodland animals. But how would we know? They’re not telling us.”
This is why people turn up in their dozens on fungi walks on damp autumn mornings, Ziggy said later. Fungi are interesting because they’re strange and alien and mysterious, even to naturalists.
“We just don’t know why a fly agaric is bright red, or why some fungi smell of aniseed or bleach. I think we’re really only at the early stages of knowing about them,” Ziggy said.
Fungi walks are a great way for the interested public and professional ecologists to mix, he said. (As well as a voluntary Sorby member, Ziggy is also a Sheffield council biodiversity officer). Everyone can get involved looking for things, and it’s easy to ask questions, not least because the fungus professionals often don’t have the answers either.
His own interest was sparked by expeditions with his Latvian father in the grassy farmland of East Yorkshire. Ziggy’s nickname comes from his dad, Zigismund, who migrated to Yorkshire after the Second World War, and brought over his continental knowledge of edible mushrooms, which he’d try to cook for his son.
“I remember once he found some kind of bolete as big as a soup dish under a hedge, which he fried for us. It looked like a big lump of liver, and ended up as some sort of red slime. It was just gross.”
It led 10 year old Ziggy to find out more about the strange things his dad brought home for dinner, and he soon discovered the dire warnings of death and poisoning associated with wild mushrooms in English culture.
“I bought him a mushroom identification book, because I was worried one day he’d do something untoward to himself.”
People in the UK tend to suffer from mycophobia, a fear of mushrooms, said Ziggy. “We don’t like them, and don’t really eat them, except for a few species we can find wrapped in plastic at the shops.”
One of the Wardsend hunters, Florian Graber, noted the difference. Back home in Austria, he said, he and his family would regularly wander off near their home to find mushrooms to eat. “We learned which are edible, and just look for those,” he explained, sensibly.
A word of caution: although the autumn mushroom gathering season will last until we’ve had a couple of sharp frosts, some British mushrooms are highly toxic and can kill you very unpleasantly. (Hence the names ‘funeral bell,’ death cap’ and ‘destroying angel’ for example).
Searching with someone who genuinely knows what they’re doing, and not eating anything you’re not that sure about, is the advice from fungus hunters. And if you’re just looking, wash your hands before you eat anything else, warned Ziggy, while the hunters roamed the graveyard.
Wardsend is good for fungi, said Ziggy’s Sorby colleague, Chris Kelly. “It’s undisturbed, with a lack of chemical interference,” she said.
After an hour or so, about 200 yards from the start, we reached a patch of acid grassland by the Penistone railway line. Here are waxcaps, said Ziggy, a bright orange, yellow or green indicator of old grassland, and a sign of environmental health.
Again, no-one knows why they are so brightly coloured. What are these mushrooms thinking about, being red or orange or purple? And what is a mushroom, anyway?
“It’s more easy to say what a mushroom isn’t,” said Ziggy. “It isn’t a plant or an animal. It’s somewhere in between. Up until about 50 years ago, fungi were just called the lower plants, but they’ve got their own biological kingdom now.”
A mushroom also isn’t just the thing you see sticking out of the ground, he said. That’s just the bit that procreates. Most of the fungus lies in tiny filaments in the soil of the woodland floor, and DNA research in the western USA has found a single specimen of honey fungus which spans over three square miles, weighs as much as four blue whales in its threads and tiny tubes, and may be 10,000 years old.
The filaments of some types of fungi, called hyphae, are now known to link up with plant and tree roots in what’s called among scientists a Mycorrhizal network, or more popularly, the Wood Wide Web.
So in Wardsend Cemetery, or Wharncliffe Woods, or any other woodland you care to mention, the trees and the local fungi are exchanging nutrients with each other (fungi pass on substances trees struggle to make themselves, and vice versa).
It’s now believed the network also allows the passage of information to all the woodland botany and fungi, like the first arrival of a parasitic insect, or disease, or maybe even fire. So, the theory goes, trees talk to each other via the tendrils of roots and fungi living underneath them.
Just the kind of thing eaters of certain types of mushrooms on Sheffield’s western boundary might have dreamed up, said Ziggy, from first hand experience.
(Like many Sheffielders, Ziggy became familiar with the psilocybin mushrooms of the Peak District - aka magic mushrooms - in the past, when he was also a member of the experimental post punk band The Midnight Choir.)
Scientific research into the properties of psilocybin was halted in the 1960s, partly for political reasons, but has now returned with scientists in Sheffield and elsewhere finding substances from these mushrooms could be used to treat depression, anxiety and drug dependence.
Folklore from around the world suggests mushrooms and fungi are cures or treatments for all kinds of illnesses (as well as paths to enlightenment), said Ziggy. Which is as good an argument as any for the preservation of biodiversity.
The point is, Ziggy says, there are so many different types of fungi out there, and we still know so little about them, that we have no idea which mushrooms and fungi may genuinely lead to cures or treatments for any number of human conditions.
The fungal hunters went their separate ways, and for all we know, the Mycorrhizal network in the tombs and twigs and soil of Wardsend cemetery told the oysterlings and waxcaps it might be safe to come out again.
“It’s not the stuff we know,” Ziggy said. “It’s the stuff we don’t know.”