Leaving the book town behind on a bright spring morning, I followed the old railway track along its lovely river. Under the road bridge to Clyro two dippers, surely a breeding pair, worked the rapids. Their briskness across the stones, their ability to walk untroubled through current and spray and emerge with beaks crammed with larvae, the explosive calls and trilling year-round song that pierced through even this amplified rush of water over rock, were an abundant delight.
They were still busy as I crossed to the western bank and slipped down along Offa's Dyke path – a tunnel here through tangled brakes of hazel and holly. A pair of mallards sunned themselves on plump moss. The path led to riparian meadows, a green woodpecker in dipping flight laughing its way above them. The entrance to a foxes' earth in the roots of a fine oak tree bore downy evidence of last night's rabbit dinner. Along the waterside, silt from recent floods told its own morning story in tracks of badger, otter and stoat. A swirling band of long-tailed tits, so diminutively pretty, flitted through branches of the oaks before scudding off to a thicket of gorse. I thought of our greatest bird artist, William MacGillivray, painstakingly dismantling one of their exquisite nests, counting 2,379 feathers that had gone into its making.
From above, as I watched the tits depart, came a soft drumming on a dead trunk – a female lesser spotted woodpecker, little bigger than a nuthatch. I remembered the species from when I worked in apple orchards at the western end of the Malvern Hills over 40 years ago – still a stronghold for them – and had not seen one since. As she flew away a late goosander skimmed past, downriver-bound. I hastened after him, heading for the pub in Gladestry and the bosomy crest of Hergest Ridge beyond.