Quote: ...a wildlife desert. Blame Wordsworth.

Come to this farm that neighbours the fell wall,

this tired house roofed with unmatched slates,

whose barns once served a medieval church

five days over the mountains to the east.

Once, two lords with a map could make us all –

cattle and sheep, fell farmers and the fells –

Scottish or English at a single stroke.

I knew those ancestors. They built this

in the time of the Restoration;

the date-stone tells of prosperity

and the raising of barns – a thousand years

of sheepwalks, spinning, cowbells and butter.

Meet the inheritor of my land, their line.

Milking his cows and turning out his tups

raddle-chested to the autumn flock, he learned

a story from every grass-blade on my flanks.

A mere ten thousand years of knowledge: how

ice, compacted a mile deep, ground smooth

Silurian grit and sandstone; how snow-melt

carved my long valleys where his ponies shelter

from the winds; where screes tumble first in frost;

which of my slopes will bloom in a dry year;

which valley bottoms slow the winter floods.

Quote: hill farming with hefted flocks, and a thriving ecosystem, are at odds.

He walks my rocks – no peat core biopsy

needed to tell him where the upland

flora come out first to shout of spring;

why forest never hid my windswept tops;

how the tangle-maned Fell mare and her foal

keep their own ground, and every hill-hardy

tuft of sweet turf ties hoof to heaf, up here

where we are roofed by unhaltered cloud.

I speak to him of childhood, when he chased

fox cubs and black-capped gulls. He remembers

how along that trod, his horse ran away

while sledging home the rusted brackens,

and his father cuffed his head and his grandfather

sent him to the forge with chains to mend.

His adolescent legs took him downhill

in seven-league strides, boots slipping on wild thyme.

If you would listen, every slope of me

would share its ghost.

He was lish then, a prize for any woman,

and a twenty-hour day no trouble;

he walked my tops to gather sheep at dawn,

clipped them and turned them back before the night.  

When he ran-out Fell stallions, for the old men

to mate to their tail-swishing squealing mares,

their lust pranced over the green spring grass

and his thighs sprinting beside them

drew the young women, flirting, hungering.

If it weren’t for that black dog of his

who growled at wedding photographs,

he could have mounted all their bouldered slopes,

laid them in any of the mossy ghylls,

my autumn turf as velvet as their skin.

But I am his Amazon, his Serengeti.

My rowan trees slim as girls’ wrists

hang their red-lipped berries over his head.

Quote: Why should Wordsworth and Ruskin govern our tastes beyond the grave?

Your paper judgement signed by city hands

can’t quantify such men as him. His heart

clings to my base rock like the fossils cling

to the mudstone sea-floor, like the peat

layers years bone-deep with carbon from old stars.

At night, before he struggles into bed,

it’s me he studies, and the sky I lean on,

for the presence or the absence of the stars,

feeling the scarf of wind worn on my shoulder

to know what morning weather I will give him.

He crawls my flanks now like a scarlet beetle,

sitting the quad bike sideways. Tamed by pain

he hunts only photographs, and the sun.

He knows Death has him in its cross-hairs

and the hammer is about to fall, but

in spirit he’s still climbing to my heights

to fetch his sheep or ponies home for birth,

or crossing the sloped meadows at my feet

cutting the sun-warmed grass for winter hay,

watching colts galloping across the snow,

bucking and kicking in a dazzle of light.

He is still naming foals as yet unborn.

Do not presume to tell him how to live.