Every other Saturday for 41 years, the word “Machynlleth” would alert nature-lovers to Bill Condry’s latest dispatch for the Guardian’s country diary. His milltir sgwâr – “square mile” – was the RSPB’s Ynys-hir nature reserve, of which he was warden.
On my way north this week, I turned in here. While there, two ravens quarrelled
with a red kite overhead; indeed, Bill’s work for the red kite committee helped a great deal towards the survival of the species in Wales. I parked in the field by the last gate before the Ynys Edwin cottage, where I’d visited Bill and Penny Condry so many times over the years.
They’re both gone now, Bill in 1998, Penny earlier this month at the age of 102. They were intense repositories of local nature lore from the postwar era, benign and humorous in their recall of those whom Penny termed “the bottoms-up brigade” – her fellow naturalists who’d never neglected an opportunity to get down on their knees to examine whatever caught their attention. Time spent with either of them was educative in the best and wisest sense, and the world seems a poorer place for their passing.
But the landscape is richer for their having been here. They enhanced it in the interests of wildlife, and had large freshwater pools with complex shorelines excavated on the reserve for nesting waders. Redshanks scolded as I sauntered past this week.
The natural world became accustomed to the Condry presence here and kept its eye on them. Each time Penny, a fine botanist, walked out of Ynys Edwin’s door to tend her garden, she looked across at a stand of Caledonian pine in which herons nested noisily and where white owls roosted against the red trunks.
I see one of them now, ghosting across the marsh, following the line of a ditch. No, this would not have been one of those that Bill and Penny saw a quarter century and more ago. Only in Welsh legend is the owl’s longevity remarkable. But their owls were probably this owl’s forebears several generations removed. The Condrys would have watched the same behaviour, and they helped protect the owls’ presence and continuity in this blessed place.
Whenever I come here, which is less frequent these days, I tip my hat to the owls, which somehow are an apt symbol of protective and sympathetic human presence here.
• 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
