Past

Radical Antiquarians on Tour The Antiquarians’ Road Trip Plus ca change

Look! There’s Mr Jingle and Mr Pickwick in Stamford, A town astride the Great North Road, All tortuous turnpikes and honey stone, Coaching inns and listed buildings: ‘GOOD STABLING AND LOOSE BOXES’;

And beyond Stamford, heading east? There’s John Clare revenants walking the roadside, And channels and rivulets and watercourses, With high embankments above the roads, And a cloud filled sky that meets the fields In a cumulonimbus towering clasp Across a dark shadowed numinous dreamscape;

But there, leaping out of the flat lands’ fastness, The vaporous tower of Ely cathedral, And all around, the oozing of the fens: Tick Fen; Langwood Fen, Great Fen, ChatterisFen, Ouse Fen, Mildenhall Fen, Burnt Fen … And all around, the waters of rivers and dykes,

And a boatyard down below the cathedral, Constant trains rattling across the freight line rails, As twilight softness gathers around the streets, And swifts soar high above the Maltings, And high above the roof of Oliver Cromwell’s house, Just as their seventeenth century ancestors did, When Cromwell strode forth with his righteous bible, Imagining a New Model Army That would vanquish Charles Stuart’s Royalists, While swifts screeched and eavesdropped high above, And a parliament of rooks observed and noted.