Becoming Lichen - irregular diary - part 7
Part of Becoming Lichen - a research project by Simon Whitehead
Becoming lichen walk 2
25.01.25. (sunrise) St Dwynwen's Day
Newtown/ St. David’s cemetery - Drenewydd/ Mynwent Dewi Sant
8 o’clock, sunrise, on a cold morning with heavy frost, a large group of people of all ages gathered outside Oriel Davies.
We began with a short introduction to the walk, Natur am Byth ecologists Josie and Ellie talked about their research with lichens in the Welsh marches and how we might begin to notice and identify the lichens that grow nearby. Cemeteries are wonderful places to encounter lichen colonies as they are largely undisturbed, quiet places, full of exposed stone.
As a warm up I invited all those gathered to greet the rising sun; a lichen sun salutation! warming the surfaces of our bodies as the sun rose across the park, we imagined the lichen waking and photosynthesising nearby.
Following a short walk across town to the cemetery, in the shade of the church there was a hard frost, gloves and hats were necessary! With hand held lenses we began to examine the stone surfaces patterned with different crustose lichens and frost. Moving across the cemetery, the lichen landscape revealed itself across the gravestones; slate, granite, marble. Crustose lichen grows outwards from its thallus (body), spreading slowly across stone surfaces, attached lightly to the stone through strands of fungal hyphae. Older lichens leave traces, one can identify their pathways as they migrate across stone. As a reasonably young cemetery, St David’s has relatively small colonies, the larger ones on the older graves. Ellie and Josie explained that this is a good way to identify the ages of lichens, a process called Lichenometry.
In order to keep warm I invited everyone to come together to explore moving as crustose lichen! Moving slowly across the cemetery together I tethered the group together with a large stretch of elastic rope, so that the experience was to move as one community body with many different members, the boundary (proto thallus) stretching and changing shape as we moved. There was deep concentration and laughter…and symbiosis!
We culminated by the grave of legendary Newtown harpist John Roberts, the script on his grave patterned with lichen. Harpist Ceri Owen Jones who had been standing nearby, began with an old Japanese ritual of waking of the ancestors. He played, harp leaning against the gravestone, listening to the resonance of the stone as it amplified his harp alongside the rooks, gulls and traffic. It was a big sound with small details. We gathered and listened, some touched the grave and the lichens, we were all transported. The ambience of stone, lichen, harp, deep time and memorial came into focus.
We ended at Hafan yr Afon for breakfast…