As part of my residency in Oswestry for ART-efact, I’ve been treating the streets of this old town as their own archive. Oswestry is in the Welsh Marches, on an often volatile border, and for centuries a place where languages have met and mingled.

The origins of the town are uncertain, although Oswestry’s market dates all the way back to 1190. The name Oswestry is thought to be a corruption of ‘Oswald’s Tree’ and the legend that here Oswald the Christian King of Northumbria fought, and very much lost, a great battle against the pagan King Penda of Mercia.

Inconvenienced by fracturing my elbow in three places while out walking at the end of June, followed by an operation to wire it back together, I’ve been exploring Oswestry’s alleys, names and traces. And doing my best to overcome the challenges of typing and taking photographs one-handed. Slow. Inaccurate!

But here’s some work that’s emerging. The poem is called ‘From Welsh to English Walls’, and these photo-poems are extracts from it.