Above Silurian clouds

We stood among a small group of people at the summit and looked around us: an ethereal flood of cloud had drowned the vales of the Severn and the Wye as a temperature inversion trapped cold air and dense grey cloud at low level. Up where we were, above its high water mark, the day was mild and sunny.

This warm, clear world into which we’d emerged echoed another that existed here 430 million years ago. Back then, a shallow sea flowed to the base of these ancient-rocked hills. In contrast to the barren centre of the continents, this shoreline teemed with life. We’d have encountered mounded coral reefs, fish and plants – now preserved as fossils in the low limestone ridges that abut the higher hills. Maybe, if we could have travelled back and splashed through those shallows, our fossil footprints would be down there too.

Standing above the cloud on a January morning, the winter sun swept away the millennia between us and this Silurian sea. The world had turned upside down and uncoupled the mundane tethers holding us to the everyday world. We could see no roads or cars, no houses, no workplaces – and no people, aside from the few others gathered around us. On this blank page our imaginations were free to write whatever stories they wished and transport us back to prehistory.

The name given to the time of the shallow sea, the Silurian Period of the Paleozoic Era, is derived from a powerful people of ancient Britain: the Silures. Under the leadership of Caractacus, the Silures resisted the Roman conquest of their homelands in what is now eastern Wales and the English borders for three decades. Legend has it that Caractacus made his last stand not far from where we stood – on British Camp, an Iron Age hill fort whose hand-carved form sticks dramatically out of line from the rest of the Malvern Hills. Like the best legends – of monarchs and monsters, witches and wizards – this probably isn’t true.

The cloud skipped and swirled and reformed as sunlight painted our Brocken-spectre shadows. For a moment, Caractacus and his army were marching again. Then a wisp of cloud passed in front of the sun and the figures were gone. We parted from our vantage point to return to the cold, grey world below.

But this wasn’t the end of the story; atmospheric pressure stayed high for the whole week. Each morning thick cloud greeted us as we opened the curtains, and we’d set off up the hill, drawn higher by the promise of what lay above. At some point – different from day to day, but always quite suddenly – the cloud would thin, blue sky would appear and we’d emerge into sunlit uplands a world away from where we began.