And this poem, which will be about England,

and, in some part, the southern margins

of the North, and the vagaries of the tongue,

has already stalled at the title’s fourth word.

Does it rhyme with ‘though’ or ‘tough?  Or with ‘cow’

or ‘row’? That is ‘row’ as in beans, of course,

not as in a shouty altercation.

It is as in ‘huff’, ‘houfe’, ‘hoff’ – from the Old English

for the heel of a hill, a projecting ridge.

As you drive through the ancient hamlet,

you do not notice any raised ground or,

indeed, the place – scattered by the road

to the Potteries – but for the signs on leaving

and entering. At one end of the hamlet –

that on the eastern edge of Cheshire –

is the bridge itself: narrow, stone, hump-backed,

replaced and repaired since medieval times.

Beneath the bridge – famed now in the annals

of English verse! – runs Swill Brook, and along

its reedy banks are endangered colonies

of water voles: aka water rats,

rats taupier, arvicola

amphibius. The brook springs limpid

from the clayey earth some miles south, seeps

northwards into the River Weaver’s catchment,

and so into the Mersey, past Liverpool,

through St George’s Channel to the Atlantic.

England’s mercantile empire shoved its

Anglo-Saxon tongue – complete with French veneer

and Greco-Roman embellishments –

down the throats of millions.