Nothing to give this any scale, but the rock face is about 200 yards away.

29th July 2020. Lockdown continues, and as part of our campaign to lose weight, we have determined to go out every day and get some fresh air  & do a bit of walking. Additionally, we have been reading back numbers of the Black Country Society magazine from the late 1970s into the 1980s, and have realised that we are woefully ignorant of most of the historic sites in the region. This is in spite of the fact that my father came from Birmingham and my mother was a Wolverhampton girl – and while, of course neither of those places are in the Black Country, they both border onto it. I was born in Wolverhampton but as my father started a business in Birmingham, we moved there in 1952 when I was 8 years old. I have travelled across the Black Country many hundreds of times, but alas, never paid much attention to it, until now.

Image 01. Credit at foot of page.

There is always discussion about the exact extent of the Black Country, but is generally as above. What is certain, is that the name is due to the intense industrialisation of the area from the 1750s onwards, and the smoky presence of hundreds of furnaces for producing iron and later steel – and may well also refer to the thick seam of coal that underlay much of the district. The materials needed for iron production: ore (ironstone), limestone, wood (later coal) and clays for furnace linings as well as that for building bricks, were plentifully distributed, and often found clustered together, as at Dudley.

Still, this page is not about the history of the Black Country of 250 years ago; it’s about a time somewhat over 400 million years ago, when the whole area was the bed of a shallow, tropical sea. Limestone was laid down over the ages – it consists of grains of Calcium Carbonate, most of which is from the shells of marine organisms, corals, & the like. Therefore, limestone often contains fossils, and those from the old quarries at Wren’s Nest, Dudley, are known world wide.

This area was called Marsh’s Quarry. A group of people are seen looking for fossils – we must try that!

So here we are. You are allowed to take some fossils from the scree that has weathered & fallen off, but are not allowed to hammer, chisel or dig to find fossils. Now the winters 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 has very little freezing weather, and I have always understood that the freezing/thawing cycle of snow & ice is a strong agent in causing rock to weather? I live about 6 miles from here, and in winter 2018-2019 there were only three nights when the temperature dropped below zero, and then only to -0.2, -0.2 and -2.1°C. Again, in 2019-2020 there were only 6 nights: -0.7, -0.1, -0.4, -0.3, -0.8, -0.2°C. So for nearly three years the temperature never went lower than around -2.0°C – and there are some people, apparently, who don’t believe in Global Warming! Whatever the case, there was plenty of scree about, but not many fossils. Thankfully, my eyesight is quite good, & we thought we would be able to see stuff while standing up & carefully looking around our feet. Alas, this was not the case.

We ended up seated on the deck, picking up small bits of stone and carefully examining them. We must have looked at 50 or 60 before success rewarded our efforts.

A small fragment of shell just over 0.5cm.

Bottom, the impression of a tiny shell; top, maybe a section through the stem
a crinoid. Q: What’s a crinoid? A: See https://youtu.be/cZcomBnNKXg

Another bivalve shell, with something else below it.

The soil is bound to be alkaline, and interesting plants grow here. I’m woefully ignorant on plants, as indeed I am on an enormous variety of things, but thanks to Plantnet ( see https://identify.plantnet.org/ ), am pretty sure this is Anthyllis vulneraria – the Kidney Vetch.

What was the sea bed, gradually got messed around & rose up out of the sea, and for all I know it might have sunk again & re-emegerged any number of occasions. After all, 420,000,000 years is quite a long time.  8^)  Nevertheless, here we can plainly see the angled layers of that sea bed. BTW, from the official site of this… er, site, you can find out more & download .pdfs which which are really great:

https://www.dudley.gov.uk/things-to-do/nature-reserves/wrens-nest-national-nature-reserve/

OK – this is a pretty confused photo., but Plantnet confidently identified it as Lotus cornicula – Bird’s-foot trefoil.

We surprised ourself with this image – just a lucky shot, I guess.
Scabiosa columbaria – the Lesser Scabious.

Here, layers of the fossilised sea bed are actually separating out! The bit in the middle…

…has many striations, which are claimed by Wikipedia to be fossil ‘tidal ripples’ in the sea bed, but the site itself states they were actually caused by crinoids patrolling around & feeding on stuff on the sea bed. (At this point, we assume an expression of intent disinterest, and direct all our attention to a tiny butterfly that has just flown past.)

Distressingly out of focus, we include it because it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a small skipper butterfly, Thymelicus sylvestris. And it really was small; our reference is ‘British & Irish Butterflies, Adrian M Riley. Brambleby Books, Luton, 2007’. He states that the tyical wingspan is 30 mm – over an inch. This one was tiny. I doubt if it was much over 20mm. It’s settled on another plant, which is…

Centauria nigra – Black Knapweed. Which is actually pale violet, not the little yellow flowers.

By this time, I don’t say I’d got lost – that would be an exaggeration. On the other hand, I didn’t know exactly where I was. Surely, that’s not the same thing? Here we are, in the Wren’s Nest. All we need to do is to keep walking, which we did. It was larger than we thought, though, and there were quite a few steps like this.

This is one of the Geopoints, where the ‘cleavage plane’ or ‘fault’ I suppose, is very obvious indeed.

Here, the Silurian sea bed has remained partly flat.

We were quite lucky to get this fuzzy image identified as Prunella vulgaris,
‘All-Heal’ – a fascinating name, due to its many valuable medicinal properties.

And here’s an old friend I have not seen for some years -The ‘Cuckoo Pint’, or the fruiting stage of the Arum Lily, Arum maculatum. It prefers damp places, as here, on the downward sloping edge of woodland, beside the footpath. I have also seen it on the tow-path of the Stratford-on-Avon Canal at King’s Norton. It has many other vernacular names: ‘Lords & Ladies’, Adam and Eve, bobbins, naked girls, naked boys, &c.

As we neared our exit point, having been directed by a kindly couple exercising their dogs, we saw a Strange Thing… an abandoned road, imperceptibly being reclaimed by nature. Such a rarity as this, is surely worthy of preservation?

Oops – we almost forgot; what might be our best fossil (for a first visit). A striated, cylindrical fossil – almost certainly a fragment of the stem of a crinoid? Obviously, ours was a crinoid of modest dimensions, but apparently some grew to vast size! Some had stems 20 metres long, so heaven knows what the diameter of those were?

So there you are. Hoping this visit to Wren’s Nest has found your approval. Oh – BTW, an “S.S.S.I.” is a ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’, which means it has to be preserved as it is now. I don’t think any of us would argue against that, would we?

For much more on the Black Country: https://www.blackcountrysociety.com/

Image 01 credit: User:XrysD / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) One possible border of the Black Country has been added.