Thunder and cuckoos on Stapeley Hill. Half the sky is blue and bright over hill country of the west. For a moment, a fierce light reflects back from the quartzite tor of the Devil’s Chair on the Stiperstones ridge. The other half of the sky, below white peaks of cumulus bergs slashed with mineral colours thickening to black with a wet mane that licks the hill’s edge towards the Severn Vale, is shuddering with thunder. A low frequency, not as loud as peals or claps, but a rumbling through the bones.
We have known since the last century that thunder is caused by lightning. Within clouds, friction between ice particles stimulates lightning, whose plasma reaches 10,000C and impacts the cooler air at supersonic speed, causing explosive shockwaves. There must be a swarm of lightning enclosed by these clouds to cause such constant rumbling. Maybe it’s only visible from weather satellites, but its sound and electrifying energy is shakingly eerie. The storm is a living thing, moving slowly and ominously across the sky.
Is this explanation any less weird and wonderful than those of previous generations who felt supernatural presences in the thunder? What did the people who built this stone circle on Stapeley Common called Mitchell’s Fold 3,000 years ago believe about the power and presence of such storm song? What too did they make of the call of the curlew, a song just west of grief, or the guy rope of skylark song tethering the land to an invisible speck of bird so dangerously close to the sun?
These are survivors from the deep past and their world hardly exists now, their populations decimated and scattered like those human ancestors who survive in folklore, or the lead miners who held their weddings here, making thunder using explosives in the ancient stones. Fragments of their speech from the throats of ravens make a black square on the hill’s flank as they watch the hopeless innocence of lambs.
But most extraordinary of all is the cuckoo: one note to call the future and one to call the past – an evocation of the present from the very core of the thunder.
• 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
