legends · 3 min read ·
Hearth Cap
A mushroom field guide gains annotations by three households, each remembering a room they have never visited.
**A Field Guide to the Fungi of the Northern Marches (5th edition, 1971)**
**Entry 118. HEARTH CAP.** *Pholiota focalis.* Cap 3–7 cm, convex, orange-brown, slightly sticky when damp. Gills pale yellow, darkening to rust. Stem 5–9 cm, ringed. Spore print brown.
**Habitat.** Woodland edge, on the buried roots of oak and beech, late September to November. Often in rings.
**Edibility.** Edible. Mild, slightly sweet, with a smell of baking. *Collectors in the Marches report it is best taken fried, with bread.*
*Annotation (pencil, Mr. G. Hallam, 1974): Found in the paddock behind the house. Fried with bread. Very good.*
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**Entry 118 (continued)**
**Notes.** Local tradition holds that the Hearth Cap grows only where a hearth has stood. In the Marches, many cottages were abandoned in the clearances of the 1840s, and their sites are marked by rings of Hearth Cap that return every autumn in exactly the same shape as the vanished walls.
*Annotation (ink, Mrs. M. Hallam, 1981): It is true. We found the ring behind the barn. Exactly the shape of a small house, with a gap where the door was.*
*Annotation (ink, Mrs. M. Hallam, 1981, below): We ate them with bacon. G. says he can remember being in the room, though he has never been in a room like it. A low room, a black range, a woman at the table.*
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**Annotations (continued)**
*Annotation (pencil, G. Hallam, 1983): I ate a second helping. It was a different house. I was standing at a window and I could see a hillside I know very well, but there were no trees on it. A man outside was calling a dog.*
*Annotation (ink, M. Hallam, 1983): He has stopped telling me the dreams. They are not dreams. I tried a little myself. I was in a kitchen, preparing something. I knew where every tin was. I knew whose hands I was using.*
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**Annotations (continued)**
*Annotation (ink, M. Hallam, 1986): The ring is bigger every year. It reaches the lane now. The shape of the house is still there but the house has been added to. There are rooms I do not recognise.*
*Annotation (pencil, G. Hallam, 1986): I have not eaten them for two years. But last night I found myself in the kitchen at four in the morning with the pan on and the bread cut. I do not remember going down. I do not remember lighting the stove.*
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**Annotations (continued, in a different hand, ink, 1991)**
*Mrs. Hallam asked me to add something to the book when I took over the house. I am the new owner. I am not going to eat the mushrooms.*
*She told me about the ring. I walked the ring in the spring when it was only grass. It is the plan of a large house, much larger than the farmhouse, with a hall, a dining room, a long gallery, a range of outbuildings, a stable block. It extends across three fields. It has a hundred and twelve rooms.*
*The ring is not a house that was. It is a house that is being built, one autumn at a time, out of the people who have eaten it.*
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**Annotations (final, in the margin of Entry 118, ink, 2026)**
*I found this book in the library of the old farmhouse. I am writing in it to warn whoever finds it next. The ring has not appeared this year. I went to look at the paddock this morning with a spade.*
*There is a floor there, laid in flags, a hand's breadth under the turf. There is a threshold. The door is open.*
*Tonight I smelled baking from the kitchen. I do not own an oven. I have gone to the door to look.*