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British Counties in Verse


Refusing a Legend: Writing Glastonbury Tor Minus Avalon | Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry
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

Alden Carrow
Aug 257 min read


How to Revise a Poem: The Unchanging Room
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

Alden Carrow
Aug 186 min read


Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry: A Map Of Pressures, Not Roads
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. It began with a stone I had never looked at 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 h

Alden Carrow
Aug 115 min read
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