Wandering on Stapeley Common is to walk on the floor of the sky. Strangely apart from the hills and valleys of Shropshire and Powys, and where the border between countries may be a raven’s flight line or a skylark’s parabola over a gorse clump, this is an outlier place. The Stiperstones and Long Mynd lie to the east, Corndon Hill and Bromlow Callow are north and south of Stapeley Hill’s ridge, and there, as if looking out to sea, are the Berwyn mountains and Cambrian hill country rolling and heaving into the west.
It is quiet up here today. There’s a breeze, but little else to sound but light itself. The drone of cloud is pierced by cymbal clashes of sunlight, here across the common and 40 miles away on hillsides and valley deeps. Light is a clear music that rings further than the eye can see. Colours, like sounds, are muted greens: the squared-up fields of the far away, peppered with solitary trees and folded woods, the land’s life draws down sunlight through the alchemy of photosynthesis to create new life.
