Country diary: The river has risen to meet the trees. This is Storm Claudia’s work | Paul Evans

Welsh Marches, Shropshire: All the ditches and drains from the hills of mid-Wales to here burst with rain. The Severn has a deadly seriousness nowLow sunlight casts the shadows of figures, standing on the Frankwell footbridge in Shrewsbury across the River Severn, into trees. The willows have shaken loose from leafing, and the light that strikes them has a brilliance no longer absorbed by hungry foliage. The trees are illuminated, freed from the processes of growth, and the river has risen to me