I Love To See: John Clare, Emmonsails' Heath, And Writing A Landscape That Isn't Looking Back

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 deliberately a lie. But to explain why, I need to start with a fourteen-line poem about a boggy heath in Northamptonshire, written by a man who had just watched his childhood landscape fenced off and closed.

John Clare, Emmonsails' Heath, and the ground that was taken

John Clare was born in July 1793 in Helpston, Northamptonshire, in a village of about sixty families. His father was a thresher and a locally celebrated wrestler; his mother was a shepherd's daughter. Clare was in the fields alongside his father by the age of ten — ploughboy, reaper, thresher and, my favourite of the job titles, pot-scourer. His schooling was whatever a village school could give him between harvests.

He published Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820 and became, briefly, a sensation. London called him the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, which tells you a good deal about London. Three collections followed, the last in 1835.

Then things went badly. He entered an asylum in Epping Forest in 1837. In July 1841 he simply walked out of it and covered the eighty miles home in four days, sleeping in ditches and eating grass from the roadside. He wrote an account of that walk afterwards. By the end of the year he was in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he stayed, still writing, for twenty-three years, until his death in May 1864.

But here is the fact that matters most.

In 1809, when Clare was sixteen, Parliament passed the Act for the enclosure of Helpston. The common land he had grown up walking across — the heaths, the fens, the unfenced ground where anyone could go — was surveyed, divided, hedged, ditched and closed. He watched it happen, and he wrote about it for the rest of his life with a grief most poets reserve for people. Inclosure came, he wrote, and trampled on the grave of labour's rights.

For John Clare, Emmonsails' Heath was one of those places: a real heath a few miles from his home. He wrote this poem somewhere between 1824 and 1832 — after the enclosure, not before. It went unpublished for another seventy years.

It runs to fourteen lines, so it looks like a sonnet, but Clare rhymes it his own way and it declines to behave.

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

by John Clare

I love to see the old heath's withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling, while the old heron from the lonely lake starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing, An oddling crow in idle motions swing on the half-rotten ash-tree's topmost twig, beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed. Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread; the fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn and for the awe round fields and closen rove, and coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove, flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain and hang on little twigs and start again.

Nothing in this poem is standing still

Count what actually happens in those fourteen lines.

The heron starts and flaps away. The crow swings idly on a rotten twig. The woodcock bounces up out of the bog. The fieldfares chatter and rove off after berries. The bumbarrels flit down the hedgerow, hang on a twig, and start again.

Every creature in the poem is leaving, or busy, or moving on. Not one of them is arranged for him. Nothing performs. Nothing waits. The heron doesn't hold its pose so the poet can get a good look — it hears him coming and goes.

And Clare's response to a landscape entirely indifferent to his presence is the first four words of the poem: I love to see.

That is the whole argument, and I think it is a profound one. His love isn't conditional on being loved back. He isn't asking the heath to mean anything. He isn't asking it to console him — and he had a great deal to be consoled about. He is simply looking at it very hard and finding that sufficient.

The least impressive thing in the county

Look, too, at what he chooses to look at.

A withered brake. Crimpled leaves. A half-rotten ash. A black quagmire. This isn't a beautiful landscape by any standard his contemporaries would have recognised — no cataracts, no sublime peaks, no postcard. It is scruffy, boggy, wintry, marginal ground. Clare finds the least impressive thing in the county and says: I love to see this.

He does the same with who is in the poem. Beside the trunk of that rotten ash, a traveller has made his bed — and Clare places him there exactly as he places the heron and the crow, without comment or judgement. He knew the Romani families who camped around Helpston, and learned fiddle tunes from them. The heron, the oddling crow and the man sleeping rough are all, in this poem, simply part of what is there.

Bumbarrels, and the refusal to be tidied

Something should be said about the language, because Clare's editors spent years trying to fix it and he spent years refusing.

He wrote with little punctuation, spelled as he heard, and used the words his village used rather than the words London preferred. Bumbarrels isn't a poetic flourish. It is simply what a long-tailed tit was called where he lived. His publisher tidied a great deal of it; modern editions have been slowly putting it back.

That refusal is part of the same instinct as the looking. Correct bumbarrel to long-tailed tit and you have made the poem more legible to a stranger and less true to the place. Clare would rather be difficult and accurate.

It is the same choice, in miniature, that the whole poem makes: describe what is actually there, in the terms it actually has, and let the reader come to it rather than dragging it toward the reader.

And there is one more thing, which is why I keep returning to this poem. Clare is describing common ground that had already been enclosed by the time he wrote. The lines had been drawn. The ditches had been dug. What he does in response isn't argue. He looks — and by looking, he keeps a version of it the survey couldn't reach.

The heath is gone. The poem isn't.

Somerset Awaits — and the title is wrong

Somerset Awaits is the first poem in Somerset In Verse. It sits right at the front, before Exmoor, before Cheddar, before the Tor: the overture for everything that follows.

Something about its title has been quietly bothering me for a year. The title says Somerset Awaits. The poem, eighteen lines later, says: Geology holds no intention; it doesn't wait.

The title is wrong. Deliberately. It is the invitation the reader arrives with, and the poem is the correction. Somerset isn't waiting for you. Somerset has never waited for anybody. But you should go anyway — and the gap between those two things is more or less what the whole book is about.

Somerset Awaits

The Bristol Channel scours the coastal faults,

a twelve-metre tide grinding against marine clay.

Inland, the rivers funnel the moorland's mass

down from the red sandstone of Dunkery

and the fractured limestone of the Mendip gorges,

settling it into an impermeable basin

capped with a deep layer of organic peat.

To live on this plain is a perpetual mechanics.

The Parrett runs in a perched embankment,

held above the fields by earthworks and puddled clay.

The ground is carved into a rigid grid of rhynes,

where water must be pumped upward,

hoisted blindly against its own dead weight,

lifting the catchment back to the sea.

Beneath the drainage sluices and the hollow karst,

there is no patience in the bedrock.

Geology holds no intention; it does not wait.

The survey lines form a fragile geometry

strung across a shifting water table,

built to deny what the deep time dictates.

The floodwater lacks malice. The rock does not yearn.

They simply outlast the pumps.

From Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, published 3rd September 2026.

A plain that dips away from the sea

The ground behind that poem is worth setting out plainly, because it is stranger than most people realise.

The Somerset Levels are a basin of clay and peat lying at or below sea level, drained by a network of channels the county calls rhynes. Beyond them, the Bristol Channel carries one of the largest tidal ranges anywhere in the world — around twelve metres, and close to fifteen at its most extreme.

When a high tide meets heavy rain, the outfalls are tide-locked. The sea physically holds the rivers back, and the water has nowhere to go but sideways, across the fields.

The lower River Parrett, crossing this basin, falls roughly a foot in a mile. That is the entire gradient it has to work with. In places the river runs above the level of the surrounding land, held there by embankments and puddled clay — a river carried across a plain rather than draining it.

And here is the wrinkle that makes the whole arrangement precarious. The coastal belt of clay sits slightly above mean sea level. The peat belt inland sits lower. So the land doesn't tilt gently down to the sea the way you would expect. It dips away from it, into a bowl, behind a rim.

Which means the water has to be lifted. Not channelled downhill — lifted, mechanically, against its own weight, and put back out to sea. There is a museum at Westonzoyland housed in one of the earliest steam pumping stations on the Levels, dating from the 1830s. The pumps have changed. The arrangement hasn't. Somerset stays dry because machinery keeps picking the water up.

The same twenty years

Here is the detail that connects all of this back to Clare, and I promise you I didn't plan it.

Much of the lowest peat moor in Somerset was enclosed between 1785 and 1791, when farmers began cutting the rhynes between their fields to drain them. Helpston was enclosed in 1809.

These are the same twenty years. The same Acts of Parliament. The same national project of drawing survey lines across common ground.

Clare's heath and my Levels were carved up by the same hand, within a generation of each other. His landscape lost its openness. Mine gained a grid it now can't survive without.

Two hundred years later, one of us is writing about a heath that was closed, and the other about a plain that only exists because it was.

What the method costs

I read the ground before I wrote about it. I traced the haematite through the bedrock, the tide across the estuary, the peat closing over a Neolithic trackway. I let the geology and the history speak first, and I tried very hard not to improve on them.

I will tell you what that costs, since these pieces have mostly been about craft.

It costs you the easy feeling. There is no sunset in this book. There is very little consolation. Somerset doesn't care that I noticed it, and the poems don't pretend otherwise — the last line of the one above is about floodwater outlasting the pumps, which isn't, on the face of it, an inviting way to open a collection.

But here is what I think it buys, and it is the same thing Clare's heath bought him.

If you don't ask a landscape to mean something for you, you can see what it is actually doing. And what Somerset is actually doing is extraordinary: lifting water uphill by machine, twice a day, every day, for two centuries, so that people can keep living on a plain that would rather be a marsh.

Nobody had to make that beautiful. It already was.

The book is out

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is the fourth volume in British Counties In Verse. The paperback was published on Amazon on 3rd September 2026 and is available now. The Kindle edition is available to pre-order.

It runs a hundred miles, from the heights of Exmoor down to the drowning Levels: a twelve-metre tide that resets the coastline twice a day, rivers held above the fields they drain, a limestone gorge being quarried and walked to dust at the same time, a hill that refuses to be Avalon, and an island of imported clay that has been sinking for two thousand years and is still legible.

Readers of the earlier volumes should know this one is harder-edged. There is less mortar of sentiment in it than in Cornwall, Cumbria or North Yorkshire. The language is treated more like masonry — the heavy, specific, correct names of things, laid one on top of another and left to hold their own weight. Everything above is, more or less, the argument for why.

The volumes so far

• Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry — available now

• Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry — available now

• North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry — available now

• Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry — paperback out now; Kindle on pre-order

• Northumberland, coast to Cheviot — in progress, March 2027

Three things that genuinely help

There is no publisher's marketing budget behind this series. What it has instead is readers, which means three small things do real work.

Leave a review. This is the one that matters most right now. Two honest sentences in the first fortnight after publication does more than anything I could pay for, because early reviews are what persuade Amazon to show a book to strangers. It doesn't need to be kind. Only honest.

Pre-order the Kindle, if an eBook suits you better than a paperback. Pre-orders land on the release day in a single block, which counts for more than the same sales spread across a month.

Tell one person. Not a broadcast. One specific person: the friend who walks, the relation who lives down there, the colleague who once told you they used to read poetry and stopped. That single handover is how nearly every reader I have has arrived.

And if you aren't in a position to buy a book, please put it out of your mind entirely. You are here, reading a poem about a Northamptonshire heath. That was always the point.

One more thing: the guest poem

If there is a poem you would like featured in a future episode of the podcast — a classic, something modern, or a personal favourite you have carried with you for years — send it to me at aldencarrow78@gmail.com.

Every suggestion goes into a draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse, sent by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you.

A frozen Northamptonshire heath, where a heron flaps off, a crow swings on a rotten branch and twenty long-tailed tits hang on the twigs and start again — none of it arranged for him, all of it beloved anyway. And a plain at the other end of England where the rivers run above the fields, the water is lifted uphill by machine, and the rock, which holds no intention whatsoever, simply outlasts the pumps.

Nothing here is waiting for us. That is exactly what makes it worth the looking.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry Paperback out now on Amazon. Kindle edition available to pre-order.