Caldbeck, North Cumbria, 28 March - 4 April 2012

The Spring Meeting for 2012 will be based in Caldbeck. The meeting will concentrate on VC70 but there will be part of one day in VC67. The base is the village hall with a meeting room, a lockable room upstairs for microscope work and a kitchen. The sites are mostly spread around North Cumbria from the Pennines to the west coast. The programme covers a number of well known Nature Reserves and SSSI’s (such as the South Solway Mosses NNR and Eden Gorge SSSI) and includes some lesser known sites and under-recorded hectads. Habitats include coastal raised mire, wetland, riverine systems, woodland and uplands in the Pennines. For the list of sites, their location and more detail on habitats see the table and site descriptions on the BBS meetings webpage. An accommodation and eating places list is also attached here (This is a popular tourist area so you need to book accommodation well in advance. The costs are current to June 2011). Local Secretaries Diane Dobson ddobson@openspace.gb.com and John O’Reilly john@ptyxis.com

Click here for the BBS Spring Meeting 2012 Cumbria accommodation list.  This is a popular tourist area so you need to book accommodation well in advance. The costs are current to June 2011. There is also an information sheet here with places to eat and buy food.

Download documents of the proposed sites and site descriptions.

Summer 2012 Field meeting

Week 1 : 23 - 30 June 2012
County Antrim, Northern Ireland
Local secretary - Joanne Denyer joanne@denyerecology.com
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE HQ FOR THIS TRIP HAS MOVED FROM BALLYMONEY TO COLERAINE
The first week of the BBS summer excursion in Ireland is based just outside of Coleraine, County Antrim.  The HQ is a holiday home in Macosquin, four miles to the west of Coleraine, where we will be able to set up microscopes for evening work.  Additional accommodation is available in Coleraine which has a range of which has a range of hotels, self-catering, B&Bs and campsites.  Details at:
http://www.northcoastni.com/places-to-stay/  and http://www.colerainebc.gov.uk/show.php?id=79
The Irish Open 2012 will be held in Portrush from June 28th to July 1st.  It is likely that accommodation in the area will become booked up for this period so it is important to book your accommodation as soon as possible.  The town of Ballymoney, 9 miles to the south east, is also a possibility for accommodation if you have your own transport:  http://www.visitballymoney.com/, County Antrim (VC 39) is famous for the Giant’s Causeway (basalt) and chalk cliffs in the north and the Glens of Antrim in the east.  Outside of these areas the VC is very under-recorded, with many hectads having less than 10 recent records.  We will focus on these under-recorded areas, but there will also be time to visit better known areas. As no hectad in VC39 has more than 150 records, there is plenty of scope for recording!

Week 2 : 30 June – 7 July 2012
County Mayo, Ireland
Local secretary - Mark Hill moh@ceh.ac.uk
The second week of the BBS summer excursion in Ireland is based in Ballina, Co. Mayo, about 1 hour’s drive from Knock airport.  The HQ is at Riverside Drive, Quay Road, Ballina, which is in VC H28 (Sligo) having been transferred to Mayo after Praeger set up the Irish vice-counties.  It is in a grid square G22 with no previous bryophyte records.  Excursions will be to East Mayo (H26; lowlands including a big turlough), West Mayo (H27; including Nephin and the Nephin Beg range, and lowland mires – but not the Paludella squarrosa site, which is exceedingly vulnerable), and Sligo (H28; Ox Mountains including a good Grimmia anomala site).  Accommodation in the HQ is booked for 12 places in two large new-build houses, and is mainly intended for participants who want to spend most of the week with us – probable cost in the range £100-£130 per week, depending on the euro rate of exchange.

Autumn 2012 Meeting and AGM

National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland
7-9 September 2012
Local secretary - Joanne Denyer, 11 Brendan House, Brendan Road, Dublin 4, Ireland joanne@denyerecology.com

The 2011 AGM and Paper-reading session will be held at the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin (Ireland) 7-9 September 2011.  The gardens are close to both Dublin city centre and Dublin airport.  There is public transport (bus) to the gardens and parking is available for a flat daily fee of €2. Accommodation will be available at the nearby Dublin City University (single en suite rooms, €45 per night B&B), or there is a choice of alternative accommodation in the area.  Full details will be published in future issues of Field Bryology.

Basse Normandie (Lower Normandy), France, 16-23 March 2013

Local organiser:  Jeff Bates (tel. 01344 884500; email j.bates@imperial.ac.uk)

The meeting will be centred on the ‘Suisse Normande’ area, probably either at Thury-Harcourt, Clécy or Pont d’Ouilly, small towns on the scenic River Orne in Calvados. However, at least one excursion will be made into each of the other two departments of Lower Normandy, Manche and Orne. 

Much of the area lies on late Precambrian and Devonian schists of the Armorican massif, but there is also granite country and, further north and east, the Jurassic limestone, all of which it is hoped we will visit.  It is an area of attractive countyside with tall hedgebanks (the famous bocage), large forests , deep ravines and some peatlands, plus a varied coastline with large dunes, rocky seacliffs and land-slips. Rainfall is relatively high especially in the west and on the hills, the Collines de Normandie, which exceed 300 m at several points, but it is tempered by summer heat in the mildly continental climate.

Despite extensive studies in the nineteenth century by the pioneer French bryologists, and in the 1970s by the late Prof. Alain Lecointe, the flora is still imperfectly known and there is the chance of making significant new finds. For comparisons with the British flora one needs to think in terms of the closely adjacent Channel Islands and southern counties of England such as Sussex and Devon. Thermophilous taxa such as Grimmia lisae, Pterogonium gracile, Pleurochaete squarrosa and Porella pinnata  are perhaps more frequently encountered than anywhere in Britain, and rarities to refind include Southbya nigrella and Bartramia stricta. Strongly hygrophilous species like Bazzania trilobata, Blepharostoma trichophyllum, Dicranum scottianum and Plagiochila bifaria tend to be more localised than they are in Brittany (see write-up of 1993 Spring Meeting), occurring in the highest rainfall areas of Manche but also in deep wooded ravines further east.

To explore the likely level of interest for this meeting and to discover members’ preferences for accommodation, it is requested that interested persons complete the form here and email it back to Jeff Bates by 1 April 2012. In brief, the options for accommodation are: (1) the organiser books a gîte de séjours which will house everybody in several rooms, provide us with a common room and we could choose to have meals provided; (2) participants book their own hotel or B&B (chambres d’hôtes) places via the internet; (3) participants book a gîte (self-catering cottage) via the internet. Camping is also available. Option (1) probably gives the best possibilities for social interaction and will also probably be cheapest but it may involve some participants sharing rooms. Hotel accommodation is quite limited in this area and the costs rather high, dependent on the level of luxury sought . In March it should be possible to find a small self-catering gîte for 2-4 people for one week for around €300 (2011 prices).