Spectral rain dogs chase through the wind across Old Racecourse Common above Oswestry. So much energy in the sky, so much fractured sunlight. Sheltered by a tangle of goat willow around North Common Pond, invisible birds set up a pod of sound made from scores of individual tweeps. A grunt may come from a hermit moorhen.
The pond surface, silvered and sepia, ripples with raindrops and sparkles with light around a wavering tracery of branches, a shadow screen reflecting the unstable nature of a seemingly solid world. Willow branches sway, some supporting tufts of beard lichen, their alter-images moving sinuously over the newty water below. In this trick of the light, the dual realities of air and water present something that is neither of the two. This chattering, shimmering pond, tucked away in a corner of the common, is like a derelict chapel with its ghost choir and mysterious rituals.
Out on the windswept heath, the first yellow buds of daffodils have materialised. Appearing from a memory of spring, the daffs arrive knowing, even before their flowers open, that they will soon disappear.
The joy of them is also the loss of them, impossible to disentangle from feelings of mortality. “We will go with you along,” wrote the 17th-century poet Robert Herrick in To Daffodils, “we have short time to stay as you … as quick a growth to meet decay.” But daffodils are spirits of the now, and it’s not quite now that they open, so until they do there is a flickering hope.
The old trees have a very different sense of time for meeting decay. Under a 200-year-old beech at the far end of the common, which grew when horses thundered over the turf, its whale-skin boughs are slick with rain, its leaf buds bullet-hard, its high branches catching the scudding greys and blues of the sky in a wind that feels so dangerous that at any moment the tree’s architecture could sunder.
Looking back from under the beech tree, the mind is drawn further than the eye to a far hill struck by sunlight. Of all the hills, the light has picked this one out before returning it to shadow.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
