Slender erect plant 30 to 60 cm high with narrow (to 5 mm) flat roughish leaves. The flower spikes are slender 2.5 to 5 cm long sometimes flushed purple. The glumes are bristle like and rough, but shorter than in Wall Barley. Awns are relatively short (<11m) and hairless.

Wall Barley (Hordeum murinum) has longer awns which are covered in small hairs.

Perennial (i.e. tillers present when flowering), found in old grasslands.  Most other Hordeum are annual, and found in cultivated or waste ground 

Good images of the flowering head and separated florets with the awns measured against a ruler or graph-paper, or a comment describing the awns. Ideally a further image of the entire sheath.

In old meadows, occasionally on verges.

Flowering June and July.

Perennial

Fairly frequent in central and southern Britain (south of the Humber) scarcer in the north and west of Britain.

Fairly frequent in those areas of Leicestershire and Rutland with heavier, clay soils. In the 1979 Flora survey of Leicestershire it was found in 348 of the 617 tetrads.