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

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

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