A black poplar leans into the brightest summer sky. The light is harsh and the air breathless on the hottest day of the year, but the tree is moved by its own breeze. The leaves dance. They sing. From craggy fissures in its bark to the high branches above, they sough and flutter, drone and hum, a song as old as these fields, yet entirely of the moment. This music of water, air and timber is redolent with living history.
Across the fields, the sound of guests at Sarah and David’s wedding celebration in a marquee, where the band plays mambo, fades into fields near Melverley where the Welsh border follows the River Vyrnwy into its confluence with the Severn. This is a classic floodplain landscape of the Severn Valley, a long sweep of green framed by the Breidden Hills and Rodney’s Pillar in the distance. Melverley was notorious for flooding, but newer flood defences on the Severn have changed that in recent years.
