Country diary: The many mysteries of the magic mushroom

It’s hard enough to imagine how another human conceives the world, let alone an animal. But that doesn’t stop us trying. On the edge of Eyam Moor, between a ruined farmhouse and a baleful plantation of pines fringed with sycamores, was a familiar stretch of pasture peppered with knobbly sheep droppings. And, as is usually the case at this time of year, in among the ovine poo were some familiar mushrooms: purple russulas, ones to avoid, puffballs, and the spindly stem and Phrygian cap of Psilocybe semilanceata, or the magic mushroom. I lay down to get a closer look.

Sometimes, when I’ve come this way in autumn, I’ve noticed small groups of people concentrating fiercely on the ground as they hunt this natural but nevertheless illegal natural high. These are often not your average bobble-hatted ramblers. But what of the sheep? Magic mushrooms do particularly well on sheep pasture, thriving on all that manure and the nitrogen in sheep urine. But is it a two-way street? Some mushrooms are toxic to sheep just as they are to humans. The sheep don’t know this, though, and tiny magic mushrooms must be hard to avoid. Watching the sheep grazing peacefully, I wondered how you would know a sheep was tripping? Do they have visions? Are there shaman sheep?

Meanwhile, near to where I lay, some three dozen goldfinches were gorging on the seedheads of a patch of creeping thistle. I watched this crowd pulling on the fine white filaments of the thistle heads, content and raucous, and richly coloured in the autumn sunshine. Then their familiar chirruping exploded in panic. Startled, I sat up to see the birds taking flight like red and golden spores, and from behind a wall one terrified goldfinch appeared, closely followed by a sparrowhawk.

For a few brief moments, the hawk, in hot pursuit, twisted and fought against the air, disappearing briefly behind the wall and then re-emerging, wings outspread as the goldfinch swerved and escaped, the hawk drifting calmly back to the nearby sycamores as the sheep grazed on undisturbed, dreaming their dreams.