Country diary: A wildfire has killed off (nearly) everything wild | Eben Muse

Cilgwyn, Gwynedd: It stripped the hill of its heather, bilberry and bog mosses - and with them the inhabitants of so many nests and burrowsA 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. Continue reading...