Day 265 - A Nature Ramble at Littlebeck Wood

The start of my Littlebeck Wood walk  - a lovely green tunnel

Hey everyone today's Day 265 and I am officially 100 days off the end of my year long adventure! To celebrate I thought I`d share a new place with you, well new to us, it`s been around for a while and some of you who live in North Yorkshire might know it but we had never been to it before! The North York Moors is a great area and there's lots of places I've still to explore and it was great to find this one. We`ll definitely be going back though because we loved it!  It`s a little place called Littlebeck which is on the outskirts of Whitby, near to Ruswarp. The woods there are a Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve. Anyway here are some details about it and what we saw there:

A little beck

• The woods are fantastic, and we had a lovely walk along the path which ran alongside the beck or stream. This is actually part of the Coast to Coast walk too.

• We knew that there were Nuthatches in the woods and we could hear them, but we just didn't manage to see any to take any pictures :`-(  We also heard Tawny Owls.

A Speckled Wood Butterfly

• We spotted a lovely little butterfly, the Speckled Wood.  It was sunning itself on a leaf and stayed nice and still for a while for me to take a few pictures.  I've already done a post on this little butterfly and you can find out all about it here.....Speckled Wood Butterfly Post.

Ground Beetle - very fast! Hard to photograph!

• There were lots of lovely rotting logs lying around which we of course had to turn over to investigate what was underneath them and living in them! Amongst other beasties we found toads, woodlice, spiders and beetles but by far the most impressive find was a fabulous Ground Beetle!  I think I'll do a whole post on him so I won't go into detail here, but check back soon!

Dryad's Saddle - well, I think its is.

• There were some fantastic species of Fungi on some of the trees too, like this one. I think this one is a species called Dryads Saddle (Polyporus squamosus) but it was a bit high up for me to get a good look but from what I've read it does fruit at this time of year. A Dryad is a mythical wood nymph and there are stories in Greek mythology about them. They are quite quickly eaten by insects so if this is Dryads Saddle maybe I was lucky to see it.

Part of the woodland path

• We didn't get chance to do the whole walk but if we had we would have come across a cave known as the Hermitage, which we will make sure we visit next time. This is a cave that in the eighteenth century was inhabited by a hermit who lived off what the wood provided.  We did find one cave that was much smaller that you could only really crawl into, and it was made of shale. I'll look forward to seeing the Hermitage next time.

Falling Foss

• As we were leaving we were speaking to a man repairing the paths, he told us how to get to a car park near to Falling Foss waterfall so we drove round to the other side to take a look. It was well worth it. It was a fantastic water fall about 10 metres tall. When I researched it I found that its name is probably from the Norse (or Viking) 'Fors' which means waterfall. One to visit if you get a chance.

Well, it was most definitely one of the best places I have ever been and I saw loads of things, some of which I had never seen before.

Hope you enjoyed,

Z.