I got to Cwmystwyth late. Like, really late. The sun was long gone, the hills were just these big, dark shapes against the grey sky, and my phone had died three villages back. The air was heavy—wet stone, soaked earth, and something sharp and green. Maybe thyme. Or just that wild, untamed smell you only get where no one’s been mowing or meddling. My boots kept getting sucked into the peat, like the ground didn’t want to let go. Felt kind of right, though. Given where I was going.
I wasn’t here for the old lead or silver mines, or whatever ghostly stuff they used to rip out of these hills. Nah. I was here for the glow. The actual, literal, holy crap glow. Mushrooms that shine like they’ve got their own internal battery. Inside a mine. Because apparently that’s a thing. Or maybe it always was, and we’ve just been too loud to notice.
Saw it on a crumpled note taped to the post office board: ‘Fungal Rambles – Tues/Thurs, 8 PM. Bring a headlamp. Leave your ego.’ Thought it was a joke. Then I read the part about glowing fungi. Not LEDs. Not some art installation. Real living things making light on their own. Signed up before I could talk myself out of it.
Elanor met us at the mine entrance—if you can call it that. The gate wasn’t so much closed as collapsed. She looked like she’d grown out of the hillside—lean, sharp-eyed, hair doing its own thing in the damp. Rubber boots, a battered waxed jacket, and in her hand, a mason jar with something pulsing inside like a heartbeat made of light. She popped the lid, held it up. A soft, blue-green throb from tiny mushrooms curled in the glass. Mycena chlorophos, she said. ‘They love it where it’s wet, dark, and forgotten. Perfect for Wales.’
Then, deadpan: ‘They’re not just glowing. They’re talking.’
Didn’t understand then. But later, underground, I started to.
We shuffled in slow, headlamps bouncing off the walls. The tunnel narrowed fast. Cold at first, then oddly warm—like the mountain was breathing. Walls slick, ceiling so low I ducked without thinking. Every few steps, Elanor’d stop, shine her light into a crack or on a rotting timber, point. There they were—tiny mushrooms pushing out of old wood. Some like little cups, others like crumpled paper. And in the shadows—faint glimmers. Like stars that fell and took root.
She named them like incantations: Panellus stipticus. Omphalotus nidiformis. ‘Up top,’ she said, ‘the forest’s yelling—wind, birds, leaves slapping around. Down here? It’s quiet. So you actually feel the mycelium. The wood wide web. It hums louder when everything else shuts up.’
Didn’t think fungi could hum. But I started to feel it—no sound, just a kind of presence. Like something stitching through the dark, tying roots and rot together.
Then she said, ‘Turn ‘em off. All of ‘em.’
One by one, the lights went out.
And the dark… man. It wasn’t empty. It was alive. After a minute—maybe ten, time got weird—I saw it. A faint glow on a timber. Then another. A ring of light around a stone pillar. Not enough to read by. Not enough to walk by. But enough to know something was there. Growing. Breathing, almost.
Someone whispered, ‘The mountain’s dreaming.’
Almost lost it. Not because it was pretty—though it was—but because it felt like being let in. Not on a secret. But into one.
Then the weird bit: little vials of spore goop. Mushy, dark sludge. Elanor showed us how to smear it into cracks, crevices, old wood. ‘Re-wilding from below,’ she called it. ‘You’re not fixing anything. You’re just… leaving a trail.’
After, back at her cottage—low beams, fire crackling, rain tapping the window—she handed out mugs. Birch polypore and mint tea. Tasted like forest floor and bark, but I drank it. She pulled out a map, marked with other dead mines, other spots where people were doing the same—quiet fungal comebacks, like whispers in concrete.
‘These places got wrecked,’ she said. ‘But fungi don’t care about scars. They see a gap. An opening.’
Walking back to my room, I kept turning that over. We want healing to be loud. Obvious. Fast. But down there? It’s slow. Patient. One thread, one spore, one quiet hand in the dark.
You don’t come here for the show. You come to shut up. To crouch in the damp. To wait for your eyes to catch up.
And if you stay still long enough, you might start to see what’s been watching you all along.
For more on the science behind glowing mushrooms, check out the Wikipedia page on Mycena chlorophos. And if you like quiet journeys into the hidden edges of the world, you might enjoy Punyapaths.