Country diary: Three crab apple trees, steeped in their own mythology | Paul Evans

The Marches, Powys: Many hundreds of years old, they are alive with stories, in their leaves that fall and in their holes full of creaturesTo walk into the green folds of hill country north of Llanfyllin is a kind of time travel. It's not to return to the past, it's to wander into a time that belongs so intimately to others, to trespass into a country of countless generations of people and trees within this tangle of road bends and stream banks, through secretive valleys in the reach of hills.The outsider's gaze flickers across the scene in rapid eye movements, so the mind can translate dreamlike strangeness into familiar forms. Often this process of assimilation fails, and what may appear familiar only heightens the enchanting weird. Across a cattle grid, along a track through an open pasture of watchful sheep, with old oaks and woods below Grave Hill, something appears that holds that intimate time of place in itself. It arrests and draws the senses to reveal itself slowly, becoming a recognisable thing, yet concealing mysteries of what it might also be. Continue reading...