Below the Old Oswestry hillfort, people dressed in black stand silently on the street to watch a hearse set off. Sixteen swallows do the crotchet and quaver thing on telephone wires, while three others zip through a hopeful sky. Walking clockwise up there, the earthworks are bright with hips and haws. Elderberries bear a glint of the reflected world, upside down. Each berry holds a purple stain, waiting to splat like wine-spit from a bird.
Beyond the wilder circles of the fort’s embankments, and under the same clear, early autumn sky, the world is dulled. A few rooks visit the expanse of stubble fields and the pastures have an empty green, not at all like the rough, rude, rangy verdure up here. Down below, a man in a tractor is meticulously flailing all the berries from the hedges.
Despite passionate and persistent local resistance, the council has caved in and will build on land adjacent to the hillfort; after all, there’s a housing crisis. Soon, much of the view from here will be full of wind turbines owned by large private companies; after all, there’s an energy crisis. I suppose the reason why the hillfort is here at all is due to security crises in the distant past, when this land was contested by rival warlords.
Today, a wake of buzzards owns the sky, six strong. They soar, wheel and mew. The swallows fly up to skim across the turf before they take off to wherever they’re going. A couple of crows and a raven pass over, then back. Small white butterflies, small tortoiseshells, red admirals and bandit-striped hoverflies shimmer around the yellow snaps of hawkbit flowers.
All this concentration of life around a unique history makes this place an island of enchantment in a land that continues to haemorrhage wildness in an ecological crisis. And who am I to parade my privileges up here, as if my maleness, whiteness, ableness and education entitles me to comment on a world being destroyed by me and people like me? It’s about time these privileges were spent and our diversities and divergences celebrated as kin to this wild life.
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