Nearly every morning we climb our local hill, Brantfell. Nearly every morning I have my camera with me. The great thing about taking the same view throughout the year is that it is different every time. You get the seasonal changes and you get the changing light.

At the end of November we also got the weather - lots of it. Not that you could see much from the vantage point. We squelched up the slope on the one dryish day in a fortnight of the heaviest rainfall ever recorded. The radio that morning had carried an interview with a local VIP suggesting that Cumbria was not the place to visit. Bridges had been swept away and even the fell rescue services had been drafted in to help with the clean up. The message was to stay off the fells. If you got into difficulty, there would be nobody to come and rescue you as they were all at full stretch already.

The view didn’t look much different - the big field at the farm was flooded and Windermere looked a little bit fatter - self-satisfied really - as if by flooding people out of their homes and businesses it had reminded us all that we weren’t in charge. We’d been rung by hoards of kind friends, concerned that we might have been affected. It was a guilty pleasure to be out in fresh air - the bit that wasn’t doing waterfall impressions. The mud on the path was a minor inconvenience.

Damp conditions, especially in autumn, have a habit of bring out the fungi - as the residents of Cockermouth may yet unfortunately discover in their homes. It’s dropped out of the news media, but there is a local fund to help some of the people unlucky enough to be still mopping up this Christmas. The fungi I encountered on the Brantfell walk were more benign and quite beautiful when photographed with the macro setting against the light. The delicate architecture is revealed of these fragile structures, but you may be required to flatten yourself on damp and muddy grass.

Fungi spread by distributing millions of tiny spores and as a group are often thought to be sinister. On walks you’ll quite often see quite innocuous fungi kicked over. The bigger the cap or fruiting body, the more it seems to be a target for the destructive instincts of some walkers. I’m keeping the location of a 20 foot ‘fairy ring’ I once walked to, a closely-guarded secret. A fungal circle of this size has probably been undisturbed for tens of years.

The type of fungi which pop up from under damp floorboards obviously need to be eradicated fast. But some types perform an important role in decomposing organic matter. Certain fungi are familiar as food, usually cling-wrapped and on supermarket shelves though if you know what you’re doing you can find them in the wild. Some are valued for their medicinal properties. Worldwide there are a staggering 1.5 million species of fungi. I just hope that the Armitt Trust archives that were also flooded didn’t include Beatrix Potter’s delightful mycological watercolours.

More about fungi at the British Mycological Society's website: http://www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/