Up on Cyrn y Bwch (Horns of the Buck), known as Old Racecourse Common, a plateau on the edge of the Oswestry Uplands, winter comes and goes in a week. There are still white punctuation marks fallen from the rich quiet of a snow spell that feels dreamlike now as the puddle ice thins to kitchen film and paths turn claggy.
The thaw is a kind of recall as the past returns. Mounds of heather, the grey, private memories of a heath, like an old tune muffled by bracken and birch. The racecourse grandstand ruins where 18th-century punters watched their fortunes gallop away like horses over the hills. West, the green folds of Powys. East, the sunlit plains of north Shropshire fading towards the Wrekin floating on the horizon. South, a track rolls down through conifers where a small stand of beech and oak are trapped, shadowy apparitions imprisoned in the vertical lines of the plantation.
Falling through trees from above are the vocal signatures of ravens. How many there are, or how many ravens make an “unkindness”, is hard to tell, but some are barking kronk, some make that cork-popping sound, and some are staccato chattering. Far from feeling unkind, the ravens call passionately, celebrating, electrified by the romantic pageants of their breeding season.
Running along the edge between the trees and fields, where the light bursts across country, is the long bank of Offa’s Dyke. This eighth-century earthwork was the boundary between Wales and England, and it’s now a rite of passage for walkers with its 177-mile-long footpath. Maybe the ravens, with an enthusiasm for gore, have not forgotten its bloody history of amputations for those once caught on the wrong side of it.
A jay is screeching from a treetop above the dyke. Although it’s a single explosive voice, if it were to be recorded and slowed down it would surely contain condensed lines of dramatic monologue. Perhaps it has to do with the jay’s age-old enmity towards owls, who are also getting busy now with their own breeding season. Perhaps, though, sharp as a buck’s horn, the jay is claiming territorial rights and shouting: “Sod offa my wood!”
• 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
