Tag: Black Spleenwort

Black Spleenwort and Wall, Staffordshire

There are several places called Wall, one is near Newcastle and that is obviously associated with Hadrian’s Wall another is in Staffordshire, and this one is on the famous Watling street a lot of which is now the A5.

The site has several plants growing on the walls, but when I visited in July many had succumbed to the hot dry summer, not so the Black Spleenwort which presumably has quite extensive roots as it is a perennial and has therefore the time to get its roots well into the wall and down to any residual moisture.

This fern is quite variable and depending on where it is growing it can look quite different. It is often to be found growing from walls, particularly in the west of Britain, in open situations the fronds are quite compact and the individual leaflets are rounded and the colour is light green. In woodlands it is more rangey and the individual leaflets are pointed and jaggy edged also they are usually dark green. One characteristic which does help to identify it wherever it is growing is that the central stalk down each frond has two groves running along it.

I had not heard of this place until I mentioned to my son that I was trying to put together something about Walls and Flowers and he said there is a village just along from where his brewery Trinity Brew Company is located on the outskirts of Litchfield. He said it was named Wall because there is a bit of Roman Wall there. Well not just ‘a bit’ but quite a lot.

Wall is however its new name, originally it was called Letocetum by the Romans who developed it as a fort on Watling Street, in fact there was probably habitation there before the Romans came as it is a junction where two ancient pathways cross Watling Street and Ryknild Street now known as Iknield Way . Also it was on a boundary between two Celtic tribes the Cornovii to the West and the Corieltauvi to the East. The original Iron age name was Lētocaiton meaning Grey Wood ( caiton has become modern day Welsh Coed ie wood).

Possibly the Letocetum referred more to the area rather than the specific location of a village as subsequent to the fall of the Roman empire the village disappeared and was replaced by another site nearby which became Litchfield a name also derived from Letocetum.

What you see now is the remains of two buildings, a guest house and a bath house. As is often the case with Roman settlements there were several reconstructions and alterations over the course of the 367 years they were here. Originally they just built marching camps as they proceeded north west along the ancient route of Watling Street, later they improved the route putting in a stone base so that communication could rapidly pass through and the the first guest house was built around 80AD but this was wooden, the first Bath house followed in 100AD but what you see now represents much later constructions made with stone and dating to the second and third centuries AD. However at its height it would have been quite a populous bustling community probably producing leather goods, glassware, pottery and metalware.

Other species growing at Wall were Mouse-eared Chickweed, Maidenhair Spleenwort, and Selfheal, but the Black Spleenwort was perhaps the commonest certainly the most impressive.

Maidenhair Spleenwort and Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire.

On a recent visit to Tintern Abbey there were not that many wall flowers to be seen. Careful maintenance is obviously required, plants growing from crevices in the stone work can add to the look of the walls but can also hasten their disintegration. In fact the interior region of the Abbey was largely a restricted area when I visited, due to a combination of the possibility of falling masonry and maintenance work to rectify the problem. It was obvious that herbicide had been applied round the bases of the walls. All that survived in these regions was a liverwort called Marchantia.

There are a few flowering plants and ferns growing in the walls but not many considering the age of the buildings. The majority of plants are growing from the top of the walls where their removal would prove more difficult. There was some Red Valerian, though most of it was the pink form, also some yellow flowers which were some species of Hawkbit ( this group is notoriously difficult to identify) There was quite a lot of Ivy-leaved Toadflax, as always, and a few small patches of White Stonecrop. The commonest plants by far were the ferns which were mostly Maidenhair Spleenwort but also some Wall Rue.

Spleenworts are one of the commonest ferns, there are several species but Maidenhair Spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes) is by far the most prevalent, infact its distribution is world wide, I suppose ferns have had longer to spread than flowering plants! If we want to get scientific then Maidenhair Spleenwort is a polyploid complex meaning it can have different numbers of chromosomes and this influences the way the plants look so that it has been split into three subgroups and these have different geographical locations and slightly different morphologies. Hey ho, don’t look too closely and they all look the same.

Despite being a ruin this is still the most amazing place, it is set in the Wye valley and so it does benefit from the surrounding scenery. How it would have looked like prior to Henry’s activities one can only imagine but it must have been even more magnificent. It would have been wonderful to see the windows with glass in, no doubt stained glass depicting all sorts of religious scenes, probably also Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. The abbey church was rebuilt under his patronage, he was Lord of nearby Chepstow Castle, in the late 13th century. The reconstruction maintained the original design of the monastery..

Henry VIII dissolved the abbey in 1536 along with most abbeys throughout Britain through his Dissolution of the Monasteries. On 3 September 1536, Abbot Wyche, 12 monks, and 35 monastic servants surrendered the Abbey to the king’s visitors. The king granted the abbey to the then Lord of Chepstow who sold the lead from the roof. From that point, the abbey lay forgotten, falling into ruin for the next couple of centuries.

After the dissolution and the removal of the roof for the lead the abbey was largely ignored for the next 200 years, some stone was removed for the construction of local buildings but mostly it was colonised by Ivy. It was later that it became a tourist destination with famous artists, poets and writers visiting. Turner visited the abbey in 1792 when he was only 17 years old and painted it, on canvass that is, not with a pot of paint and a ladder. You can see plenty of plants indeed bushes growing from the walls in his depiction. Also Wordsworth was another famous visitor some time later.

Incidentally there are several different species of Spleenwort, the commonest is Maidenhair Spleenwort but you could come across Green Spleenwort where the central midrib of each leaf is green not brown. There is also Black Spleenwort which has leaflets that are complex not simple and the central midrib has a double groove along it. I describe that fern when visiting a Roman village now called Wall which is in Staffordshire. And finally there is Sea Spleenwort which has a coastal distribution, largely western and it has bright green fleshy leaves. So there is more to Spleenwort than you might have thought.