15-05-2025
Country diary: A wildfire has killed off (nearly) everything wild
A thick blue haze hangs over the valley – Cilgwyn has burned again. Dead fingers of blackened heather snap underfoot, and each step kicks up a cloud of ash. 'Deliberate ignition' was the given cause of the last major fire here, in 2021. Before that, in 2018, another threatened to engulf the village, a kilometre west of Eryri (Snowdonia). Who was the deliberator of this one? I shouldn't speculate.
As a teen I searched here for boulders to climb, but today I'm picking over the hill's smoking bones. Gone is the heather, the bilberry, the bog mosses, which usually soften the place. Detritus now dots the ground, things usually hidden by the gorse: cans, rusty wire, a perfectly symmetrical piece of sheet metal looking like an ersatz butterfly. I feel something hard under my shoe: a golf ball, perfectly toasted.
The most promising of the bouldering stones stands out in the char. A broad, squat monolith, its rough shoulders are festooned with lichens of green, grey and crimson. Quartz white in a sea of soot, it floats, raft-like, with its living cargo. The surfaces of smaller rocks are fractured from the flames that swept over them. If they ever held much life or harboured any climbing holds, they don't any more.
Wildfires have always been a fixture here, but they sound a more troubling note now. Spring and summer are arriving early, and nature is forced to adjust, with birds building their nests weeks earlier too: Corehedydd y Waun (meadow pipit) and Clochdar y Cerrig (stonechat) are among them. I wonder how many had nests here already, after such a dry and warm spring in a very wet part of Wales.
Time has passed since the blaze. Kneeling down, I notice a burrow exposed by the fire: probably a mouse's. It would be a miracle if its inhabitant was spared. But regeneration is already under way; tiny green shoots are peeping out to check if the coast is clear.
The burn halted at the edge of a path. The compacted dirt and exposed gravel were firebreak enough to hold it at bay. Stepping over the hearth into the land of the living, the earth softens. Is that birdsong I hear?
Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
