Country diary: a landscape reshaped by molehills

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire: The moles' unlicensed mining and despoliation sends farmers, greenkeepers and gardeners mad

The last snow lasted a few days but felt like weeks. It vanished in an instant: one spring-like afternoon it felt as if a conjurer had whipped away the tablecloth leaving everything standing.

What had changed, and radically so, was the table. It was as if the ground under the snow had been through a strange transformation and some charm had been working invisibly, resurfacing the countryside. Sheep stared with beatific expressions at earthworks that had appeared around them. In the snow and bitter wind, the sheep had been in a trance and, woken by the vernal equinox, beheld the results of what Jack Kerouac described in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity as "Roaring dreams take place in a perfect still mind." However, the roaring dreams were not those of sheep but belonged to underground minds of the workers John Clare called mouldiwarps, or "The Mole", as a gamekeeper of my acquaintance would whisper murderously.