Cumbria

Water and stone. Water is stone is water.

Stone jutting, thusting in pinnacles.

Stone quivering in fragments on shilly-beds.

Stone gouged and chiselled by glaciers,

Weathered into grotesques.

Stone hewn and hauled into sacred circles.

Stone packed into walls and roads.

Handled by generations of dalesmen

For sheepfolds, farmsteads, bridges, churches, mills.

Stones in tranquil valley bottoms.

Stones clustered on ledges and in gulleys.

Crouched in millions on stormy summits.

Skygazing as seasons pass.

England’s landscape garden

Is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil.


A spread map conjures Nordic gutturals:

Fells, becks, gills and tarns,

Brant slopes and flou brooks,

Slacks, hauses, grains and scars.

Somewhere, a sheep, binked on a ledge,

Sends loose pebbles skittering,

And an overfeagued hiker, blister-hirpled,

Toils, stark-thewed, through clotted mist.


Nineteenth-century Tourists circulate,

Browsers in a gallery, comparing

Pictures and frames.

They fill notebooks with classical allusions,

And aim Claude-glasses tinted to an antique glow,

Shrinking unwieldy views to Lilliputian perfection.

Regattas resound on the meres,

Cannon salvoes from mock naval battles

Echoing among the peaks.


Near Gosforth the Esk and Mitre

Coalesce in a sad estuary,

Stillness slashed by seabirds’ cries,

Sand, sky and water melting into silver-amber blur.

Enter into the sand-dunes, the sere grass hummocks,

The long glisk of firth beyond.

Blink at the black ships approaching in line,

Riding low and flatbacked, prows reared high,

Sea-dragons charging to battle.

In Gosforth churchyard an Anglo-Viking cross

Rises, Christ-tree and Yggdrasil,

Its roots deep in the ocean’s floor,

Girdled by the coils of the Midgardsworm

That catches its own tail in its teeth.

One wolf swallows the Moon, another the Sun.

Loki writhes, bound, the adder round his neck,

Punished for his dirty tricks and jibes.

“An axe age, a sword age,

Shields shall be cloven,

A wind age, a wolf age,

Ere the world sinks...”

Odin on Sleipnir, upside-down,

Gallops down to Mimir’s well to consult the oracle.

The Magdalene gazes upwards

At her crucified love,

Dying at the juncture of two worlds;

Underneath, two wolf-headed ogres

Thrash in mortal combat.