Bewick Walks To Scotland: Sequence (B) Haltwhistle Poem by Sally Evans

Not Newcastle's invader
but borderers, farmers and worse,
further over the fells than I ever walked
seeking the small, gentle things of the countryside.
I still found the gentle things, wild roses
gooseberries and redcurrants in the hedge
round each earth-hump trying to be a field
in that squashed, crossed, upheaving country;
rills running innocently into the South Tyne,
where, those bone-white fortifications
hiking high on the line of sight,
abandoned military ruins ruin the view.
Everthing tries to ignore the past,
but it is there, like a carcass in the marsh,
or a skeleton blown in the treeless wind.

Here were the corbies at a gate.
My cousin lives here, out in the wilds.
He is a prize fighter. He needs to be.
He guided me round rather nasty hovels,
operations to scavenge the military stone.
Not to mention the sheep-stealing.
To be mixed up in that business
is not at all advised.
Wild stories run down to Newcastle
with the floodwaters, refugees
fiddle and play their way through Hexham
down to the work and wheat of docksides.
There was an ash tree, there a pine.
I have followed a footpath all this time
and it leads to a peat hole,
a sodding peat hole
at the back of beyond
and I must retrace my many steps.