“It gives showers for today,” says the man poking an errant sprig of privet back into the otherwise immaculate face of the hedge. This micro-fidget sends a ripple, strikes a tone – there is something weirdly perfect about today. It appears in a rainbow, its feet touching earth beneath black vanilla clouds, with one crock of gold buried under Wat’s Dyke – a ghostly linear earthwork of the northern Welsh Marches – and the other under the orthopaedic hospital in Gobowen. As the sky lifts to a pale autumnal blue, the middle of the arc fades, but the remaining colours are vivid fragments of a lucid dream.
Black sheep are lying in the centre of the hillfort because it was and will be raining and they don’t want to be disturbed from their reverie on a spot of warm dry grass. But they are alert now and all staring in the same direction, as if some spectral dog lopes along the fence-line. These are iron age sheep with hard mouths and sharp eyes that shaped the hill country long ago, arranging themselves, black on green – a captive audience from pre-history that is indifferent to human drama. The birds are quiet and distant, even the invisible ones within spitting distance in the hawthorn and oak scrub, their conspiratorial chatter bright as berries, coded into their own frequency.
Photograph: Mick Sharp/Alamy
The far hills are hazy; rains stalk them. Whatever gathers there is beyond this one place, floating free of pervading horrors; even the shadows we cast don’t touch the ground. Then an apparition materialises out of the thin air through which it flies, to alight on a bracken frond. Blacker than a rook, redder than a rosehip, whiter than smoke from the chipboard factory at Chirk – it’s a red admiral butterfly. Perhaps not the last but certainly the most pristine of the many red admirals seen this year, the butterfly adjusts its position on the frond as if aligning to magnetic north.
As it does so, the perfect mystery – of a butterfly and unseen birds and black sheep under a rainbow during a moment smoothed into a hedge – is uncannily strange and familiar at the same time. This is ecological beauty.
• This country diary is dedicated to John Vidal, who died on Thursday 19 October. John was the finest environmental journalist of his time, a great Guardian figure, and a dear friend to us for nearly 50 years; this diary was written from John’s home patch; his magnificent enthusiasm for life is sadly missed.
