Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photos.
Words of the day were obvs bound to be
Metaphor, Palimpsest, Serendipitous,
Inscription and Superscription,
On such a walk as this;
A train ride to Stonehouse
And then a walk through what once was Standish Hospital,
Now a Dystopian Derek Jarmanesque seeming film set,
A Victorian mansion built as a temporary home,
Becomes a Great War hospital,
Becomes a sanatorium,
Becomes an NHS hospital,
But now a building site in limbo,
Fencing all around the mouldering mansion,
The once-were stables,
The towering red brick chimney at the boiler house,
The Japanese knotweed infested lakesides,
The art deco sanatorium: its clean air and sunlight,
Long gone the way of all flesh;
We continued past streams and brooks and railway lines and bridges,
Past ridge and furrow and Revenants,
Past round barrows etched on the skyline,
Past churches and graveyards and lost villages
(And Standish, where the body of Edward the Second rested en route
From Berkeley Castle to Gloucester Cathedral),
To see the line of motorway and the cathedral of the Anthropocene:
‘We are Stroud travellers to an antique land,
Who saw two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the waters … near them, in the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is INCINERATOR, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level river stretches far away.’
On through sinuous paths through wide open fields:
Blackthorn smoking in the vaporous air,
And not just a profusion of spring flowers,
But also a profusion of names for the same flower,
Down there, by the gravesides:
Cuckoo pint, arum lily, lord and ladies;
Lady’s smock, or shall we call it cuckoo flower?
Then on past shaded, modest violets,
Scented wild garlic,
Alexander, primroses, bluebells,
Stitchwort, hemlock, honesty,
With tales of Tyburn Tree and conspiracy,
Lost Roman settlements and treasure,
Medieval moats and mottes,
Skylarks soaring and rooks calling to their parliament,
Past echoes of milk churns at long lost country platforms,
To sit beneath the milk-white pear blossom,
Here at the Beacon and Railway Hotel,
And the level crossing,
Penning these lines,
Before ascending to Haresfield Beacon,
And ramparts and ditches and bulwarks,
With Will Kempe morris dancing for Elizabethan company,
To reach a copse where Robin Treefellow hypnotised us:
Up on Broadbarrow Green
grazing my milch cow and two sheep
on the rough turf
my two feet on common earth.
The wind blows freely about the haw thickets
loosens smells of young green beech leaves
put in mind
of my life
hard grace from God
services and labour through the year.
I lend all myself to fending
off hunger.
Broadbarrow Green is the only earth
I can stand on without bending my back
in toil to my lord
no only my milch cow and two sheep
are my care up here.
Up where on ridge and edge
I can see below
Standish Manor
with open fields
that know my foot’s trudge
my aching bones.
So I speak their names
to send them to the clouds:
Stony Field
Lynch Field
Little and Great Combe Fields
Ridley Field
Odmarlow Field
Clayardin Field
Wayardin Field
Shutfurrow
High Field
Podley Field
Cooknell Field
Broadcroft
Great Harefield and Little
Charcroft Field
Moncraft Field
Marsh Field
Meadland Field
Breach Field and the Stopple.
I’d linger a while longer
on Broadbarrow Green.
For play and merriment
in bagfuls bids me shrug
the fields for a snatch in this heaven
and know that grace of being light footed again like my youth
when I chased Mabel about the lizzory trees.
Addendum: ‘In The Open Air‘ by Richard Jefferies published in 1885 –
‘There shone on the banks white stars among the grass, petals delicately white in a whorl of rays – light that had started radiating from a centre and become fixed – … Give me that old road, the same flowers – they were only stitchwort….’