Under grey skies the air is perfectly still in Launde Big Wood and the space between the grand arching ashes and big solid oaks resonates with the songs of robins and marsh tits. Chipping calls of nuthatches are frequent as they forage up the tree trunks, and in the distance a raven cronks.
The woodland has a pleasing structure; broad grassy paths meander through high forest and areas of coppiced hazel. In one of the more steeply sloped compartments of the wood, just inside the entrance, clear water burbles over the gravelly bed in a narrow stream, a tributary of Eye Brook.
Despite stacks of deadwood, and given the dampness of the ground and great age of the wood, the fungal display is a little disappointing. Nevertheless we locate a handful of magnificently mauve wood blewits (Lepista nuda), one of the most splendidly delectable of mushrooms.
Nothing today, however, to compete with the excitement last week of finding a wrinkled peach (Rhodotus palmatus) growing on a dead elm 12 miles away in Bulwick. The domed cap of this pink mushroom is exquisite, with, in this case, a very slight crinkling of its semi-translucent, subtly velvety, cuticle. The fungus is listed as vulnerable to extinction in Europe, although it is still encountered sporadically in the UK, which has perhaps the best remaining populations.
Launde Big Wood, and nearby Launde Park Wood, although managed by Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust, are part of the Diocese of Leicester’s Launde Abbey estate. The imposing ironstone abbey sits in extensive parkland to the north of the woods; it incorporates fragments of an Augustinian priory founded 900 years ago, but surrendered to Henry VIII in 1539. Thomas Cromwell intended to live there himself but was executed before taking up residence; he left the estate to his son Gregory (who was married to Henry’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Seymour), whose renaissance tomb dominates the adjoined chapel. After a rebuild as a country house in the 1600s, and passing through several families, the property was returned to the church in 1957 and once more serves a spiritual purpose as a retreat and cafe.
