Cumbria in Verse - Lakes To Fells In Poetry

 

​Cumbria is a collision — of ice and industry, of volcanic rock and shifting tide, of deep time and human endurance. Lakes to Fells in Poetry stands inside that collision and refuses to look away. Across seventy-six poems, it maps the full breadth of the county and the Lake District at its heart: from the highest market town in England to the submarine yards of Barrow-in-Furness, from the ancient stone circles of the Eden Valley to the drowned iron workings of the coast, from the volcanic centre of the fells to the saltmarsh edges of the Solway Firth.

This is not a collection of pretty views. Each poem stands in a specific place and listens — to the geology underfoot, to the labour embedded in the stone, to the weather that never stops reshaping the land and the lives built on it. A Lakeland fell becomes a record of four hundred million years. A Herdwick ewe carries the boundary of her range in her blood. It is a portrait of a county defined by pressure, fracture and endurance, where beauty is inseparable from work, from geology, from the long memory of place.

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What's inside the collection

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Lakes to Fells travels Cumbria the way the land actually meets you — by fell and estuary, by weather and tide. The thunder of Aira Force. The still water of Ullswater under a black peak. The post-industrial towns and the volcanic heart of the central fells. The stone circles that have kept their ground for four thousand years. Each of the seventy-six poems stands in a named, specific place and reads it closely: its rock, its history, its ordinary present-day life. Together they form a map of Cumbria drawn in verse rather than ink.

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Who it's for

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This is a book for anyone who loves Cumbria and the Lake District — whether you walk the fells each season, grew up here and moved away, or carry the county in your family's memory from further afield. Readers in the UK, the United States and Canada have found their way to the series. If you value landscape writing in the tradition of Robert Macfarlane, Simon Armitage or Kathleen Jamie — poetry that treats place as a living archive rather than a backdrop — Lakes to Fells was written with you in mind. It makes a considered gift for the walker, the Wainwright-bagger, or the reader with Lakeland roots.

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A sample from the collection

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A radial spill of valleys

hinged on the igneous dome.

The cloud base doesn’t hover, it grounds,

wiping the peaks with a wet rag,

feeding the cold momentum

that scours the V-shape deeper.

 

We maintain the friction

of stone upon stone, a dry logic

separating the pasture from the fell.

The Herdwicks know the difference;

they are hefted to the rock,

grazing on the thin margins of yield.

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