Ptilidium ciliare Ciliated Fringewort

A dioicous leafy liverwort which grows in acidic grassland, rocky slopes, cliff ledges, dwarf shrub heath usually in well drained acidic sites in the uplands. The ragged-looking pinnate or bipinnate shoots with long, narrow teeth on the leaf margins give it a fairly distinctive, attractive appearance and it can only be confused with the much rarer Ptilidium pulcherrimum and the markedly oceanic Mastogophora woodsii, which is not found in Wales. It is a wide-ranging, Boreo-arctic montane species with a western and northern distribution in Britain and is a fairly common species of acidic, upland grassland in Wales. It has a rather scattered distribution in West Glamorgan where  it is found in the acidic grasslands on Cefn Bryn, Rhossili Down and a few sites along the northern edge of the South Wales Coalfield in Neath Port Talbot, where it is probabaly under recorded. However it may have decreased in some areas as a result of intensive sheep grazing. Sporophytes are very rare.