Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 takes us on a beautiful journey through the British countryside, drawn from The Guardian’s beloved Country Diary. With an introduction by Ian McMillan, and illustrations by Clifford Harper.
For over a century, The Guardian’s Country Diary has published the nation’s most celebrated writers of natural history as they capture the essence of the British countryside.
From Yorkshire to Belfast, Orkney to Cumbria, and Gwynedd to the Scottish Highlands, exquisitely written and softly observed snapshots emerge – of fishes lurking in dusky pools, of age-old trees beneath deep blue skies, of lives being lived alongside the ebbs and flows of the natural world.
Bringing together the finest contributions to the column from recent years, Under the Changing Skies is an essential companion for all those with a deep love for the British countryside, charting its subtle changes over the course of the seasons.
With contributions from Cal Flyn, Mark Cocker, Josie George, Nicola Chester, Lev Parikian, Amy-Jane Beer, Kate Bradbury, Andrea Meanwell and many others.
Here is an extract:
With a delicate flutter, the season has turned
WENLOCK EDGE, SHROPSHIRE
Autumn is the time to feed addictions,
obsessions and enchantments
A comma butterfly settles, head up, on the trunk of a crab apple
tree. We are on the turn: the harvest moon, a big brass lamp, rises
through oaks above the Severn Gorge and lights the ghostly
breath of mist caught in the hazels arching over lanes; bats jink
against the blue even-glow of a sky stretched taut as nylon, and
a hawk-moth purrs against your cheek; out in the stubble fields,
before the ploughs return, there is a stillness that smells of sleeping
horses.
In woods by the priory, tawny owls recite the most beautiful of
old forest languages with an excitement not heard during laconic
summer nights; leopard slugs the size of severed fingers draw silver
roads through cut grass, and earthworms slip backwards under
torchlight; a toad, badly injured, walks stiff-legged from an unseen
trauma towards some dark place where it can retreat into the jewel
inside its head. Put out of harm’s way, it was found later, flattened
on the road, paying the harvest debt of John Barleycorn.
Mornings are nippy, washing over faces like stream water as
mizzle slips from branches into the soil, leaving an ochre residue in
the crowns of lime and birch. Puffballs and ceps have bitten chunks
missing, like foam-rubber toys found under a hedge.
Gossamer tripwires of orb-weaver spiders glint as the sunlight
enlivens, animates, shines the surfaces of stone and wood like
shoes, magnetises insects to tremble with new powers; they – the
wasps, bees, hoverflies and true flies – come flying in to rooms of
light, chasing intoxications of fruit, nectar, pollen and unmentionable
juices, in this the season to feed addictions, obsessions and
enchantments.
There is a quickening of creativity in the air, a nation of the imagination,
something bright as gold, loamy as humus, dark as shadow,
free as fungal spores; these colours composed on the wings of
a moment poised in a glimpse of being.
A comma butterfly settles, head down, on a crab apple tree. We
have turned.
by Paul Evans, 2019
