Yesterday I went for a New Year’s Eve walk with a friend around Longton Brickcroft Nature Reserve. The first thing I saw, on the gate on the way on in, was a small patch of moss with a tiny spider stringing a thread between the sporophytes. I think the moss is Creeping feather-moss (Amblystegium Serpens), but I’m not sure about the spider. The presence of palps shows its a male and I suspect it belongs to the Linyphiidae ‘Money Spiders’, likely one of the species impossible to identify without a microscope.

It felt like an omen of a mossy and spidery New Year.