Two sets of works on local busy A roads
on the same day, morning and afternoon,
diverted me down lanes I had not travelled
for decades: eastwards to Beeston Castle
on its sandstone rock, westwards to Essar’s
refinery on the Mersey marshes;
spring lanes edged with cow parsley, and banked
with hawthorn hedges flowering; Friesians
glimpsed through a gate, a ploughed field’s furrows
the turned colour of mahogany;
through Saxon settlements – Foulk Stapelford
and Hargrave, Picton Gorse and Little Stanney,
Hoofield and Wervin – as if the Romans
had never come, and the Normans never would;
from doomsday parish to doomsday parish;
sunlight shifting, seasons unfolding,
the past almost within grasp.
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By David Selzer