Hall Hill by Ray Morris - Lancashire Poetry

Surrounded by a limestone wall

The old grey vicarage stands secure.                                                                            

Behind its chimneys dark and tall

Looms the deep purple of the moor.

The boggy moor, where every stride

Wrings out the water from the peat.

Where grouse blend in and safely hide

And, startled, rise beneath my feet.

A long-dead copse of rowan tree,

Petrified by cold winters’ blast

Sentinels standing silently,

Guarding the secrets of the past;

Those fossils of an ancient time,

When prehistoric shellfish thrived,

Now lie entombed within the lime

Of the stone walls which yet survived.

Sea floor which, in millions of years,

Has gradually been lifted up

Gladly collects the heaven’s tears

And stores them in its soggy cup.

The lime stone over millennia past

Has, sponge-like, succumbed to the rain

Which has carved out a cavern vast

Before emerging once again.

From past to present change the tense,

As, at the summit, consciousness

Stimulates each and every sense

Into an acute awareness

Of the beauty there displayed.

The Hodder, in its rocky bed,

Ripples along like a silver braid

Under the stone-arched bridge ahead.

By Whitewell church and ancient inn

It moves between the steeper height

Of a sombre, sunless ravine

To hide away now out of sight.

Fertile fields take a gentler course

Up to the copse spattered foothills.

They, in turn, succumb to the gorse

And ling which o’er the summit spills.

This is where cartographers place

The United Kingdom’s pinion.

The heart could find no finer space

Throughout the Queen’s vast dominion.

Was it location on the maps

That led them to this conclusion?

Or could it be that they perhaps

With Heaven were in collusion?

Ray Morris

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