Country diary: A desperate feast on a rotting fungus

The Marches, Shropshire: As the heatwave passes, we seem to be left with decline and decomposition

They are darklings, leathern, nocturnal, folding into themselves, sludging towards corruption. They smell - not foul, but strongly of something overripe, a declining libertine, yeasty and gloriously soiled.

These penny buns, the colour of old pennies, are the fruiting bodies of Boletus edulis, a bolete mushroom that appeared in the last days of the heatwave, growing along the edge of an avenue of lime trees in Oswestry's Brogyntyn Park.