I’m working on a set of poems that have developed after a week spent in Uley and Owlpen.  I found well-worn tracks and holloways, the ruins of a medieval cloth industry built on wool, hills topped by Neolithic barrows, topped again by Iron Age hillforts, and once again by a smallpox isolation hospital, once again lost.  There’s still poverty.  There’s still wealth.  Here’s a faint flavour of place.

we stop for breath and the wood
breathes leaves
on the steeps
below Uley Bury

*

in the dark lane
you look both ways

it wends low in the land
& nights, the badgers
own this road

*

smallpox under
the sycamore avenue
on the islanded hill

such old, old trees

*

so many things
vanish
without trace

one is pulling up its roots,
has started walking

*

this is how beech leaves
take the light down with them –
make use of water
to sink it into soil

*