Country diary: A floating ghost town with a soaring view of the world | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: At the iron age hillfort of Old Oswestry, time hangs heavy in the air hereOld Oswestry is the hillfort at the end of the street. Or three very different streets. One is of distinctive red-brick houses for the workers who built the Cambrian railways in the steam-driven 19th century. One is the line of Wat's dyke, a 40-mile earthwork that runs through the Marches from north Shropshire to the Dee estuary, in parallel to the more famous Offa's Dyke, and may have been raised in the border-obsessive eighth century. Another, in the imagination, is a line of fortified settlements with particular earth ramparts constructed during the tribal paranoia of the iron age across Europe and Britain.Where these streets converge, under the sharp blue of a January sky, Old Oswestry stands as the hill of its own fort or a fort of its own hill. Rising from a plain with a soaring view of a world, it is a place where history has not finished with us yet. Continue reading...