Go into any half-decent stretch of Dean woodland in January and there’s a thing that happens to your eyes. The ground colours flatten — brown leaf litter, grey bark, pewter sky through bare canopy — and then you start to see it. Something the colour of toffee, in clusters, where the trunk of a dead ash meets the soil. Or a translucent ear-shaped thing growing out of elder, almost exactly the colour of dried blood. Or velvet, improbably soft, on a stump that you’d walked past assuming there was nothing left alive on it.
The Forest of Dean has been producing winter fungi for as long as there’s been a forest, which is a very long time — the Dean’s boundary oaks and beeches in some areas trace back through continuous woodland cover to well before the Domesday Book. And people have been eating them, or been very careful not to eat them, for exactly as long. What the old forest communities knew about winter mushrooms wasn’t the kind of knowledge that got written down in herbals or recipe books. It was field knowledge, the kind kept in the head and passed along lanes and through hedgerows rather than across library tables.
Some of it survives. Not all of it.
January is not nothing for fungi. It’s not October — the great autumn flush of ceps and chanterelles and the bewildering variety of smaller species — but it’s not empty either. Three species are worth knowing in the Dean specifically.
Velvet shank (Flammulina velutipes) — This is the one that will genuinely surprise you if you haven’t been looking. It grows in clusters on dying or dead hardwood, particularly elm and ash, and it grows through winter including hard frosts. The cap is toffee to amber coloured; the stem is distinctly velvety and darkens toward the base to near-black. It’s edible and good — mild, slightly mucilaginous when cooked, better in broth than on its own. The velvet shank is also, somewhat wonderfully, the cultivated parent of enokitake, the long-stemmed white mushroom you’ll find in every East Asian supermarket, grown in near-darkness so it etiolates and loses all resemblance to its wild form. The Dean version looks nothing like that. The Dean version is stocky and dark and grows in January gales.
Wood ear / jelly ear (Auricularia auricula-judae) — Grows almost exclusively on elder, year-round but particularly visible now when there’s nothing else on the tree. The folklore around this one goes back a long way: it was traditionally called Judas’s ear, from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an elder tree. The name contracted over centuries — Judas’s ear, Jew’s ear, wood ear — and the folklore shifted around with it. It’s edible, used extensively in East Asian cooking, and has no particular flavour of its own; it takes on whatever it’s cooked with and contributes a distinctive slippery texture that’s either wonderful or appalling depending on your disposition. In the Dean it grows on the elder that lines old field boundaries and tracks — you’ll find it wherever you find elder, which is most places.
Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) — On beech, mostly, in fans. Less reliably present in January than the other two but worth looking for on big dead beech after mild wet spells. The most commercially cultivated mushroom in the world after the button; the wild version is better in every way.
What you will not find reliably in January, regardless of what any general foraging guide tells you: chanterelles, ceps, most of the choice autumn species. They’re in the ground already, as mycelium, waiting. January is their rest.
There’s a thing about mycological folk knowledge in English woodland communities that’s different from the continental European tradition. In France, Poland, Hungary, Italy — countries where wild mushroom gathering has always been a serious domestic activity — there’s a well-developed vernacular knowledge of species, season, and preparation that sits comfortably alongside the botanical tradition. Ask a French grandmother about girolles and she’ll have opinions. In England, and in the Forest of Dean specifically, the tradition was more cautious. More negative. The working knowledge was often as much about what not to eat as what to eat.
This isn’t timidity. It’s the right response to a landscape with Amanita phalloides — the death cap — which is native to Dean woodland and which contains enough amatoxin in a single cap to cause lethal liver failure. The death cap looks, to an inexperienced eye, like several edible species. It has no smell. It tastes, apparently, fine. And it will kill you, slowly, over several days during which you’ll feel better before you feel much worse. Forest communities that ate the wrong thing died. Communities that taught their children to be very careful about which mushrooms they were dealing with, and to know only a short list of species very well rather than a long list of species imperfectly, survived longer.
The knowledge passed down through Dean families is specific rather than comprehensive. Velvet shanks on ash in winter: yes. The pale tan mushroom on the woodland floor in autumn that you don’t know: leave it alone. The oyster fans on beech: yes, that one’s fine. Elder ears: yes, if you know what elder looks like.
That last qualifier is the key. The folk knowledge wasn’t really about the fungi. It was about knowing the trees.
This is what the foraging apps miss, or rather, what they can’t give you through a lens. The velvet shank on ash looks different from velvet shank on oak, which is less common and worth noting. The jelly ears on a young elder sapling in a hedgerow will be smaller and more delicate than those on a thick-trunked old elder in a field corner. The oyster fans on a dead beech log will be in a different stage of development from those on a standing dead tree, because the moisture and airflow are different.
Knowing where to look — knowing the Dean’s dead elms, the elder-lined old cart tracks, the big beeches on the Wye Valley slopes — is bodily knowledge. You build it by going to the same places across multiple seasons. The iNaturalist app is genuinely useful for confirmation and for finding community records of what’s been found where; there’s a Forest of Dean fungi project on the platform that has years of sighting data and some excellent photographs. PlantNet will identify a jelly ear from a photo with high confidence. Neither can tell you which particular stretch of the old tramway between Coleford and Parkend has the best elder. That you have to find yourself.
What they can do is give you the confidence to go in the first place. Misidentification anxiety is real, particularly for British foragers raised on the cultural memory of death caps. A clear photograph matched to a reliable app ID, cross-referenced with a decent field guide — Roger Phillips’s Mushrooms is still the standard, dog-eared copies in every forager’s bag — gives you the confirmation that what you’re holding is what you think it is. That’s useful. That’s a service the old forest knowledge never had: a second opinion from something that has seen millions of fungi photographs.
Velvet shanks: discard the lower stem, which is tough. Slice the caps and sauté in butter with garlic, or add to a broth where they’ll contribute body without dominating. They hold up to longer cooking better than most mushrooms.
Jelly ears: wash thoroughly, slice or leave whole, add to stir-fries or soups. They will soften and become slippery when cooked; lean into it. Dried jelly ears rehydrate well, which is worth knowing — gather more than you need and dry them on a rack.
Oysters: large ones, tear rather than cut. Quick, hot pan with butter and a little thyme. Eat them while they’re warm. All three species freeze poorly. Eat them soon or dry them.
The Dean doesn’t have a single best spot for winter fungi; it has many good spots distributed through the whole forest. Old dead elms along field boundaries between Newnham and Blakeney hold velvet shanks most reliably. The elder-heavy hedgerows on the eastern edge of the forest toward Mitcheldean are good for jelly ears. The big old beech stands in Nagshead and around Speech House sometimes produce oysters after mild wet spells in January and February.
The Dean Fungi Recording Group documents finds across the whole forest, and their data is available through iNaturalist. A January walk doesn’t need to be a hunting expedition; it can be a recording one, adding observations to a collective picture of what’s fruiting where. If you’re new to foraging in the Dean, the Dean Foragers group runs occasional winter walks. Foraging with someone who knows the forest is worth more than any app or book, for the same reason the old forest knowledge passed through people rather than paper.
Found something in the Dean you’re not sure about? Photograph it from multiple angles — cap, gills or pores, stem, base if visible — and post to the Forest of Dean Fungi Project on iNaturalist. The community identification is usually quick and reliable. Do not eat anything you’re not certain of. The death cap grows in the Dean.
What winter mushrooms do you know from the Dean or the wider Welsh borders? Family knowledge, old names, specific spots you’ve been going to for years — put it in the comments.
Coming next on Folktech: Cawl — the Welsh stew that was traditionally kept going for days, and what that says about patience, community, and what happens to lamb when you leave it alone long enough.