Originally Posted by echinosum

It is so much easier in the flesh when you can get a much better idea of the texture of the thing, how slimy, how fragile, etc, you get used to the jizz of certain things. Now this ought to be fairly easy, is my initial thought, because there aren't many with such prominent rings on the stem. But I'm struggling.

My instinct is that it is a Lepiota of some kind. But my doubt comes from the fact that they usually have quite white gills, sometimes a little bit off-white. I can't quite tell from your photos if yours has gills that are too off-white to be consistent with that: certainly you'd expect the young ones to have white gills. There are about 60 species of Lepiota in Britain, and Phillips only gives about a third of them...

Now the most common species with off-white gills and a ring like that is Honey Fungus, Armillaria spp, which is very variable in form, but they come in great clusters together, not individually like the ones in your photos, and are rarely as squat as yours, so I don't think it is that, you will be pleased to hear.

A couple of other ringed genuses - Hygrophorus has slimy tops and waxy gills, so not very plausible; Hebeloma tends to remain convex capped and not with the scales like yours, and rarely so persistently ringed. A continental book I have mentions a genus called Limacella, which has white gills that can mature off-white, but Phillips doesn't have it, so it may not even be present here; or he may have included it in Lepiota, which it is very close to. It clearly isn't an Amanita, Agaricus or Coprinus, or near approximation to any of those.

Finally there is that great dumping ground, Cortinarius, with very variable form and colouration, many have veils, a few have rings. There are about 230 species in Britain: they are nearly all uncommon, but there are so many species that together they are fairly frequent. Identifying Cortinarius is an expert job, and not many of those can be bothered. That Horse Whisperer bloke did himself a lot of damage eating a Cortinarius he thought, quite bizarrely, was a Chanterelle - the one he found was orange but that was about as far as the resemblance went.

Some ideas for you to chew over, anyway.