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The fourth volume in British Counties In Verse arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September 2026. Here is what it is, how it was written, and why it does not sound like the books that came before it. An illustrated image of Glastonbury Tor Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry There is an outcrop of limestone on a Mendip hillside holding four hundred million years of pressure. I had walked over it in my head perhaps a hundred times. That is where Somerset In Verse

Published 2nd June 2026 There is a particular pleasure in reading poetry the way it was meant to be read — slowly, aloud, with time to let each line settle. From Thursday 4th June, you'll be able to do exactly that wherever you happen to be, because Cornwall In Verse – Tide To Tor In Poetry arrives on Kindle. Cornwall In Verse – Tide To Tor In Poetry will be available on Kindle from Thursday 4th June 2026. The Cornwall poetry book has been available in paperback for a little

There is a peculiar weight to a landscape that refuses to be merely seen. Cumbria, with its ancient fells and brooding lakes, holds such a weight. It is a place that insists on being felt, walked, breathed, and, in my current work, written. For the past months, my focus has been entirely consumed by the slow, often arduous, process of shaping this particular corner of England into language, for a collection I'm calling 'Cumbria In Verse – Lakes To Fells In Poetry', due for pu

Alden Carrow - British Counties In Verse. North Yorkshire is a stunningly beautiful region rich in history and culture, and now you can experience it in a whole new way—through poetry! We are excited to announce that North Yorkshire In Verse - Moor To Shore In Poetry is now available for purchase as both an ebook and a paperback on Amazon. This collection serves as a poetic exploration of the region's market towns, coastlines, and countryside, inviting readers to immerse them

Eleven years ago this month, the fire in the Redcar blast furnace went out. The town didn't go with it. That gap, between what a place loses and what it keeps, is one of the hardest things a poet can try to write. Lean one way and you get nostalgia: rusting gantries in soft golden light, and everything better back then. Lean the other and you get the holiday brochure, where all is well now because there is ice cream. Neither is fair to the people who live there. Below you wil

A curved cliff in the Yorkshire Dales, a grieving Victorian poet, and three habits for any writer trying to put on the page something that is no longer there. Stand at the foot of Malham Cove and you get a strange feeling. You are looking at a waterfall. It has the height, the width, and the curved lip at the top. It is only missing the water. In my last article, beneath the broken tower at Helmsley, I argued that most ruins have human hands behind them, but that sometimes th

Time takes the blame for every ruin. At Helmsley, somebody gave the order. Last week we stood on the East Cliff at Whitby. This week we go inland, to a market town on the southern edge of the North York Moors, where the River Rye comes down out of the hills, and to a castle that was broken on purpose. There are two poems here. The first is more than four hundred years old and is spoken by a city that has vanished. The second is my own, about Helmsley Castle, from North Yorksh

Two ruins by water. Poe's drowned city fell silent; Whitby Abbey never did. A Whitby Abbey poem, Poe's The City in the Sea, and a craft question for anyone who writes about place.

A year before he died at Arras, Edward Thomas wrote "Tall Nettles"—eight lines about some old farm tools going under the nettles. He declined to feel sorry for them. That refusal is the poem. Faced with something neglected, most of us feel the same reflex. A derelict building, an overgrown garden, machinery going green at the edges. We assume it has fallen from a better state, and that the proper response is to restore it or to mourn it. Pity Arrives Before Thought Does Two p

Around a hundred and thirty lead tablets were dropped into the hot spring at Bath, asking a goddess for justice. She never answered. They survived anyway. The reason why is the most useful thing I know about writing loss. Two thousand years ago, someone stood at the edge of a steaming pool in Somerset, scratched a message into a thin sheet of lead, and dropped it into the water. The message wasn't a prayer of any grandeur. Somebody had taken their cloak from the bath-house. T

Two hundred years ago a farm labourer watched surveyors draw lines across the common ground he loved. What he did next is the most useful thing I know about how to write a place. Here is the idea underneath everything below, and it turns out to be the whole reason I write any of this down. Nothing here is waiting for us. That is exactly what makes it worth the looking. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry opens on that principle, in a poem whose title is deliberatel

Two poems, both ending with a human structure underwater in the dark. Only one of them is still readable. The difference should change how you write. An artistic illustration of Glastonbury Lake Village In 1912, Thomas Hardy wrote about the wreck of the Titanic lying on the seabed — the jewels designed to dazzle now lying lightless, and the fish drifting past them asking what all this vanity could possibly have been for. It is one of the great poems in the language, and the w

Glastonbury Tor is the most mythologised hill in England. I wrote a poem about clay shrinkage instead — and I am still not certain I was right. A realistic wide landscape photograph of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, England, seen from across the flooded winter levels. Glastonbury Tor has been the Isle of Avalon since at least the twelfth century. It carries Arthur, Guinevere, Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, the ley lines and a great deal of living spiritual practice. Walk

On ruthless revision — and the one thing in a poem that must never move. A deep limestone cave chamber inside a British gorge, reminiscent of Cheddar Gorge You can revise a poem to death. I know, because I have done it. Not once. The usual advice is to be ruthless: kill your darlings, cut anything that isn't working. And there is real sense in that. Most first drafts are too long, too pleased with themselves, and carrying at least one line the writer loves for reasons that ha

Kirkstone Pass, from Cumbria In Verse – Lakes To Fells In Poetry An illustrated image of a dramatic single-lane mountain road climbing a steep one-in-four gradient through the Lake District fells, Kirkstone Pass, Cumbria. The gradient tightens to a one-in-four strain where the road binds the volcanic flank. Gravity drags the scree in a slow descent toward the valley floor, scoured by ice. At the saddle, the world contracts to a line. Dry-stone walls brace against the heavy fe

Some places give themselves up in an afternoon. Others withhold, and ask to be read the way we read a difficult poem — slowly, twice, out loud if no one is listening. Brampton is one of the withholding kind. I went looking for its official history and found four ledgers stacked one on top of another, and then I went looking for something the ledgers could never hold. Here, first, is the poem that came out of that looking. Read it before you read anything I have to say about i

Twice a day, for two hours either side of high water, the gates of Silloth's dock swing open. For the rest of the day, no ship can safely enter at all. I've come to think that this little harbour on the Solway is one of the best working metaphors I know for something every poet eventually has to reckon with: the difference between freedom and formlessness. The surprising truth is that constraint, properly understood, is not the enemy of good work. It is often the very thing t

On writing a landscape you mean to become part of Words by Alden Carrow On writing a landscape you mean to become part of Peat under the fingernails. Rain finding the seam in an old coat. A boot sole worn thin by the same miles, walked a hundred times. This is where the real question lives — not in the abstract, but in the wet ground underfoot. The question is this: what does it mean to write about a landscape not as a visitor passing through, but as someone who intends to be

What does a poet do with a place that can’t be saved, can’t be celebrated, and will not recover? A place the world has simply finished with? Because there is a strong temptation, writing a poem like Cleator Moor, to flinch at the last moment. To reach for the redemptive ending. To find the wildflower growing in the rubble, the child laughing in the empty square, the green shoot that promises the town will rise again. We are trained to want that. We feel that a poem owes its

Every town in Britain keeps two stories about itself, and they are usually at war. Camborne is one such town — and the question it forced on me is one every honest writer eventually has to face. This is the central problem behind so many working class poems, including my own. How does a poet write about labour and hardship — about a place built on the broken backs of working people — without either romanticising it or reducing it to nothing but misery? Because there are two e