It’s happenstance that I glance up from a corner of the Pleasure Boat Inn in Hickling on a quiet Sunday evening and see the Guardian natural history writer Patrick Barkham at the bar. When he tells me that the pub is owned by Norfolk Wildlife Trust, I wonder briefly if one of us has drunk unwisely. But he is, after all, president of the trust, and when he explains that it already owned the surrounding land, that the purchase has both restored a cherished community asset and created opportunities to introduce an entirely new demographic to the wildlife of the Norfolk Broads, it starts to make sense.
At Patrick’s suggestion, the following morning I take a walk through the managed mosaic of nearby Hickling Broad Nature Reserve. Where a path emerges from a small woodland, I find myself flanked by a shoulder-high bramble hedge. Mundane and maligned bramble may be, but in full bloom, intertwined with flowering honeysuckle, it looks beautiful, smells amazing and is humming with life. I let my focus drift (the same trick required for those “magic eye” images of the 1990s), and everywhere there is movement: many species of bee, assorted sawflies, dozens of different hoverflies, darting damselflies.
I push my face into a hall-of-mirrors space where stems and foliage form a maze of interconnected chambers and passages. The air inside is submarine green and humid. When a break in the clouds allows hot sunlight to penetrate, there’s a corresponding intensification in the insect hum. I raise my head and spot a new kind of movement. My first ever swallowtails, the largest, fluttery-est, buttery-est of British butterflies, are sashaying above the hedge like supermodels working a catwalk.
Their sheer glamour calls to mind the kohl-and-gold extravagance of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra: wholly excessive, but somehow they pull it off. The impression is heightened by a rattle of camera shutters each time one alights to strike a pose. I’m the only one not brandishing a long lens (indeed I’m grateful to one of the photographers, Dee Maddams, for emailing me her glorious pictures later). So while everyone else is frowning in concentration with their eye to the viewfinder or camera screen, I’m free to beam and half-dance my delight along the hedge.
• 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
