Old Oswestry is the hillfort at the end of the street. Or three very different streets. One is of distinctive red-brick houses for the workers who built the Cambrian railways in the steam-driven 19th century. One is the line of Wat’s dyke, a 40-mile earthwork that runs through the Marches from north Shropshire to the Dee estuary, in parallel to the more famous Offa’s Dyke, and may have been raised in the border-obsessive eighth century. Another, in the imagination, is a line of fortified settlements with particular earth ramparts constructed during the tribal paranoia of the iron age across Europe and Britain.
Where these streets converge, under the sharp blue of a January sky, Old Oswestry stands as the hill of its own fort or a fort of its own hill. Rising from a plain with a soaring view of a world, it is a place where history has not finished with us yet.
