When another storm came strap-hanging on the jet stream, pouring Atlantic rain over sodden ground, ditches burst, rivers flooded and water from this well rose out of its tank, over the skin of liverworts and across a little patio of slabs laid in a 1989 heritage restoration project, whose plaque reads: “Oswald’s Well. Legend states King Oswald was killed in battle against King Penda at the battle of Maserfield. An eagle lifted, flew and then dropped his arm at this site from whence a spring of water has since bubbled.”
This is Maserfield in Oswestry, where the terrible battle was fought on school playing fields, open-plan lawns of 60s semis and bungalows, between dwarf conifers and trees reaching from a bloody seed bank underneath. Here, on a cold, January night, flowers of Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’, the winter-flowering cherry, open from pink buds under streetlights. It is quiet; there’s someone with a dog, someone running, no sign of gore pouring under drain covers towards the well, where the bird dropped his arm in the miraculous world of 642.
