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 hundred times.

That is where Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry started. Not with an intention to describe Somerset, but with a smaller and more awkward question: what am I standing on, and what slow force put it there?

Every place in the book begins from that same question. So I read the ground before I wrote 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 wrote down what they said.

What came out is a book of attention rather than nostalgia. The hope behind it is simple, and I will state it plainly: that you will never again cross this county — or your own — without looking down.

Read one first: Dunkery Beacon

Before anything else, here is the second poem in the collection. Dunkery Beacon is the highest ground on Exmoor and the highest ground in Somerset. On a clear day the sightline runs eighty-six miles, from the Brecon Beacons to Dartmoor, with nothing in it to tell you the scale of what you are looking at.

At five hundred and nineteen metres,

the eighty-six-mile sightline reaches

from the Brecon Beacons to Dartmoor without a scale anchor.

Wind shear strips the ridge, suppressing the ling heather

to low, interlocking mats across a loose shattered bed

of Hangman Grits and fracturing veins of white quartz.

Decades of boot soles have stripped the fibrous peat.

Walkers step wide of the wet depressions,

braiding parallel tracks through the gorse,

working the exposed gritstone down to dust.

Beside the triangulation pillar,

a prehistoric cemetery holds the highest ground —

five round mounds, Robin How and Joaney How,

echoing the Norse haugr.

They weather beside the unwrought squares

of three ruined fire-hearths that held the signal grid

and gave the beacon its name.

Moist air from the channel hits the slopes

and condenses, an orographic fog that shrinks

the horizontal plane to ten metres of white mist.

Saturated peat slumps under its own sheer weight;

a waterlogged soil-creep pushes the shattered rock,

the signal hearths, and the Bronze Age dead

a fraction down the hill,

slowly lowering the roof of Somerset.

That is the register of the whole book: the correct name for the thing, and then the next correct name, set one on top of another until they hold.

A county built on a long argument between water and land:

Somerset turned out to be extraordinary ground for this kind of attention. A twelve-metre tide resets the coastline twice a day. Rivers run in perched embankments, held above the surrounding fields by earthworks and puddled clay. Water has to be pumped upward, against its own weight, simply to keep the fields dry.

And the poems keep returning to the same fact. The floodwater has no malice in it. The rock has no intention. They are not adversaries, and they are not in a hurry. They simply outlast the pumps.

Some of what waits inside:

• A village that becomes an island every winter, where a pottery kiln is still fired every two months while the water climbs past the depth markers.

• The largest timber monument in the British Isles — invisible, because it survives entirely as four hundred columns of soil where the posts rotted away.

• Steart Marshes, where engineers cut a two-hundred-metre breach in an embankment and let the sea back in, turning flooding itself into infrastructure.

• Bath, where rain that fell ten thousand years ago still surges up through a fault at forty-six degrees, indifferent to every god we have dedicated it to.

• The lake village near Glastonbury, where hurdles pressed flat by the weight of the marsh have not rotted in two thousand years.

The range runs from Exmoor's heights to the drowning Levels, from Iron Age hillfort to working reactor. Dunkery Beacon opens a hundred-mile descent that ends, near the other end of the collection, at a Bronze Age village built on a floating island of clay in a marsh. The book is meant to be read as a map of pressures rather than a map of roads.

An honest word: this one is harder-edged

I would rather say this now than have you open the book expecting the earlier volumes and find something colder waiting.

North Yorkshire, Cumbria and Cornwall carried a more lyrical cadence. They were, in places, more willing to be beautiful about things. Somerset is harder-edged. There is less mortar of sentiment in it. 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.

Whether that is an improvement is not really for me to say. But it is honestly where the work has gone, and if you write yourself, it may be the most interesting thing about the book: what happens to a poem when you take the sentiment out and ask the nouns to carry the load alone.

Where this sits in the series

Volume	Status
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	3rd September 2026
Northumberland In Verse — Coast to Cheviot In Poetry	In progress, March 2027

Three ways you can help — none of them obligatory

The honest position is this. There is no publisher's marketing budget behind this book. What it has instead is you: readers who care about this sort of attention being paid to places. That is genuinely the whole engine.

So, three things, in ascending order of effort.

1. Remember the date. The third of September. There are no pre-orders to place and no list to join — the paperback will simply be there on the day. If you have ever thought about picking up one of these volumes, launch week is the moment it matters most, because early sales are what tell Amazon's systems that a book is worth showing to strangers.

2. Leave a review. Reviews are the thing everybody asks for and almost nobody does. But for a book like this one — no marketing spend, no shop-window placement — a handful of honest reviews in the first fortnight does more work than anything I could pay for. It does not need to be long. Two sentences is plenty. And it does not need to be uncritical; an honest review is worth far more than a kind one.

3. Tell one person. Not a broadcast. One 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, specific handover is how almost every reader I have has arrived.

And if you are not in a position to buy a book right now, please do not give it a second thought. The reading is the thing. It always was.

One date to hold

The pumps will keep running. The tide will keep coming back. And the hill will go on quietly lowering the roof of Somerset, a fraction at a time, whether or not anybody is standing on it looking down.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry Paperback, on Amazon, from the third of September 2026.