It was a lovely day this past Saturday for a public lichen walk through the Great Churchyard in Bury St Edmunds, which I led as part of the 2026 Bury Wildlife Festival.

The Great Churchyard is situated between St Mary’s Church, the civic church of the city of Bury St Edmunds, and St Edmundsbury Cathedral, the seat of the Bishops of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. It’s an ancient churchyard, part of the grounds of the Abbey of St Edmund, which is now in ruins but once one of the most important abbeys and pilgrimage sites of medieval England. Some tombs still standing in the graveyard date back to the 17th century.

The churchyard, as well as the Abbey Gardens with their ruins nearby, are good lichen habitat. They both host more lichen and lichenicolous fungi taxa than the 50 or so in the average Suffolk churchyard: 71 taxa in the Abbey Gardens and 60 in the Great Churchyard, according to previous records. But records also show that the last time either site was surveyed was 1992, over 30 years ago.

Indeed, my short recce ahead of the lichen walk added 11 taxa to the count in the Great Churchyard, and five to the count in the Abbey Gardens. Some of these new taxa are due to taxonomic changes over the past 30 years, but some are new observations. Two of them are ‘nationally scarce’ species that are probably just under-recorded:

• Flavoplaca (Caloplaca) dichroa, which used to be lumped together with similar lichens under the aggregate name ‘Caloplaca citrina s. lat.’
• Kuettlingeria (Caloplaca) albolutescens, which at one time wasn’t adequately distinguished from Kuettlingeria (Caloplaca) teicholyta

But one of the new lichens was a bit more special:

• Verrucaria polysticta, once confused with Placopyrenium fuscellum (Verrucaria fuscella), and a nationally ‘notable’ lichen that seems really to be scarce in Britain even if it’s also under-recorded due to past confusions

So after more than 30 years, the Great Churchyard and Abbey Gardens deserve some renewed attention. I intend to return at some point for a closer look. I also hope to be able to lead some lichen training for the recording team of the Bury Water Meadows Group (BWMG), the local wildlife charity that hosts the Bury Wildlife Festival and helps to record and manage wildlife in both sites.

Many thanks to the BWMG for inviting me to take part in this year’s festival. I’m also grateful to the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society for supporting this youth outreach event through their new scheme to support the work of County Recorders.