The Lyons Share

This is one of the Tegenaria species, or House Spiders, (there are 9 species in the genus on the British list according to the British Archnological Society website) and I'm not able to identify them yet. I would need to take the specimen and look at his palps under the microscope. This one was stuck in another spiders web and looked very dead. So much so, that Nick made a girly yelp when it suddenly came to life when he went to retrieve the specimen! Ha ha. We were there to try and relocate the Purse-web Spider that Nick found there yesterday (and to exercise my back) but we couldn't find it. Bugger.

We saw quite a few spiders in the half hour we were there including these species. The top one is  Amaurobius similis and was found on a flint wall. It has distinctive palps. The middle photo is one of the missing-sector spiders Zygiella x-notata and was hanging around on a grave. The bottom photo is Drassodes cupreus and was happily sheltering on the edge of a crypt. You need to see this under the microscope to separate from another closely related species.

On the way out I saw what I thought was Bermuda Grass growing on some bare ground between gravestones. I took a specimen and it turned out to be the naturalised Hairy Finger-grass.