Toadstools

I'm shamefully ignorant about mushrooms, fungi and toadstools and not even sure what distinguishes them from each other.  But  via googling  I'm pretty certain the one above belongs to the Amanita Muscaria and even if I had felt the inclination to eat them (no, thank you!), all the information I could find online advised against it! But I love the look of these fairytale growths. They seem to have sprung up from one day to the next as I could swear they weren't there yesterday when I walked the dogs and yet today I could see those splashes of red among the trees.

Seeing them was one thing; getting to them to take the photographs was quite a different thing altogether. It involved donning wellies, wrapping myself in a coat and diving into the thick evergreen forest where the trees are so close together that their branches are interlinking. With the coat wrapped over my face and virtually on my knees I crawled in until I sort of guessed I had reached the area where I had spotted them. Then I unwrapped my head and looked, and they were all around me. 

Not just the red ones either, but these much larger brown ones too! They have a very interesting texture but don't make for a very good photograph. I have no idea whatsoever about their name and I'm definitely taking no chances of bringing them home with me for consumption!  It dawned that I also didn't know just how these growths ensure there will be a future generation but I guessed that by leaving them where I found them there would be a much larger chance of seeing more of them next year!
I haven't photo-shopped these images in any way. The light was sort of magical in between the dense trees with the sun penetrating where it could, specially near the edge of the forest, and it managed to make the mushrooms look like fairies should be sitting on their edge! Didn't see any though.