Country diary: What looks like snow but acts like paper?

Solway Firth, Dumfries and Galloway: This hollow in a field, usually full of water, is now carpeted with a strange, fibrous white substanceKeen gardeners will be aware of snow mould, the fungal disease that causes off-white patches on the lawn in early spring after snow has melted. But then there's this, a blanket-like cover of strange white material in a field below Screel Hill on the Solway Firth. In all my years of nature watching, I've never seen anything like it before.Initially, I sped past it to my favourite beach with Connie the springer, thinking the residue was salt, like the salt pans in Portugal. After all, this reedy hollow often has a pool of water in it. But on reflection, it was too far from the sea to be saltwater. On previous visits here I had assumed (always dangerous with unnatural history) that this pool fluctuated with the water table - either that or it just held rainwater. There are similar such small lakes on the west coast of Ireland, called turloughs; they appear and disappear according to whether the rainwater can drain into the ground. There is a turlough in Wales, one in Norfolk and three in Northern Ireland. There are, however, none in Scotland. Continue reading...