Today it’s my privilege to welcome rising star, Stewart Carswell, to drop in to reflect upon his collection, Earthworks (Indigo Dreams, 2021).

Throughout the book there are a number of poems that all share the Earthworks title, each one exploring a different historical earthwork in England. This poem was the first of those to be written.

I like exploring wild landscapes, and entering a new place will often kick-start a poem. In early 2019 I visited Offa’s Dyke in Gloucestershire and a few months later I was at Welshbury hill fort, exploring a similar set of ideas about ramparts, woodland, boundaries, and defences. I compressed my pages of notes about those two places into this one poem. The rest of those Earthworks poems came together pretty quickly later that summer, helped in part by walking the Great Stones Way…