Paul Evans opens from a pub opposite the ruins of Oswestry Castle and immediately collapses 861 years into a single sentence. Henry II gathered Marcher Lords in 1165 to crush a Welsh alliance; Evans and a modern crowd gathered at Chirk Castle — Castell Y Waun a'r Ardd — to watch volunteers in heraldic colours re-stage the Battle of Crogen. The pivot between centuries is so casual it feels inevitable, which is exactly the trick the best Country Diary entries pull off. The historical detail is real and specific. Henry sent woodsmen to raze the Ceiriog Valley's cover but left one sessile oak, Quercus petraea, at which Owain Gwynedd rallied his army. That tree, the Pontfadog oak, survived for an estimated 1,600 years as the National Tree of Wales before a storm brought it down in 2013. Evans holds a fragment of it, a gift from the Guardian's former environment editor John Vidal — a physical link in a chain of custody that runs from medieval sovereignty to 21st-century journalism. The battle re-enactment itself gets warm, affectionate treatment: crashing swords, fine horses, boinging arrows, a running commentary for the crowd. Evans notes the historiographical uncertainty — whether Crogen was a great battle, scattered harassment, or no fighting at all — and then delivers the verdict that matters: the Welsh won. The Marches remain contested ground, and the ambiguity of the record is itself part of the story. The piece turns on the garden wall. Over it, two clouded yellow butterflies — Colias croceus, migrants from North Africa or southern Europe — flicker over the herbaceous borders. Evans names them with the same precision he gave the oak's Latin binomial. Then a small copper, Lycaena phlaeas, opens its wings in what Evans calls a display of 'mystical heraldry and valour.' The butterflies are not decoration. Set against massive insect population declines, their presence carries weight he doesn't belabor. This is nature writing as palimpsest — each layer (medieval, arboreal, entomological, ecological) written over the same ground, none fully erasing the others. The column runs barely 500 words, and every one pulls double duty. The fragment of the Pontfadog oak is both relic and evidence; the clouded yellows are both beautiful and embattled. Evans trusts the reader to hold both registers simultaneously. The piece closes with a plug for the anthology Under the Changing Skies, collecting Guardian Country Diary entries from 2018–2024. For readers who've never encountered the form, this single column is a clean entry point: short, dense, layered, and absolutely confident about where it stands in the tradition of British landscape writing.
