Hall Hill by Ray Morris - Lancashire Poetry
PUBLISHED: 16:42 14 April 2011 | UPDATED: 19:11 20 February 2013
A poem called Hall Hill by Ray Morris
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 heavens 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 oer the summit spills.
This is where cartographers place
The United Kingdoms pinion.
The heart could find no finer space
Throughout the Queens 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