The field we walked is a former quarry site called Deep Rake, which has been backfilled with spoil and is almost desert-like in its stoniness. This summer, the ground is even more dry and hard, yet as we crossed, we chanced on something that was as beautiful and unexpected as it was dangerous.
It was a wasps’ nest. About 10 inches underground, it had a limestone slab over the core and occupied the space of a deflated rugby ball. The outer structure comprised papery scallops overlapping like roof shingles. Every one had multicoloured bands – a pattern arising (one assumes) as the workers laid down the pulp, mouthful by mouthful, but from a multitude of timber sources. Each change of hue thus represents both hours of work and marginally different colours of wood. In a way, the nest is this entire landscape rendered through the art of paper-making, and all over its delicate detail were the artists themselves.
Some of you will perhaps be wondering – shouldn’t that nest have been enclosed in darkness, hidden to the world, accessible only through a wasp-sized entrance? Yet this was a nest in chaos and, in truth, the owners looked disoriented and uncertain, even lost.
The heart of the drama we were obliged to imagine. The night before a badger had snuffled across these flats and, in one moment, its exquisite senses had drawn out of the infinity of Longstone air, a wasp’s pheromone trail to the underworld. Down it dug, back-pedalling paws through the baked ground until it could hear the growing hum of thousands of workers primed for defence. There would have been a moment when all that tissue-like delicacy met the earth-sharpened iron of badger claws. In came the striped snout as its owner’s steel jaws sheared through the nest, the adults and the sweet, sugar-filled larvae, mouthful by mouthful.
It must have been carnage. Here before us was its sorry aftermath: the shattered colony, the excavations and the loose orange soil tamped by badger prints. At the core of our astonishment was an image of that latter animal, thickly assailed by desperate wasps, their venom apparently worthless on an old brock’s ancient wasp-hunting hide.
• 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
