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Where Waugh Once Walked
I was not here when Waugh passed by,
With his walking stick and a poet’s eye.
No stone held back the moorland stream,
No steel had yet disturbed the dream.
He knew this land in wilder days —
The open moor, the untamed haze.
He climbed from Foe Edge, boots worn thin,
To find the world’s great peace within.
He saw no tower pierce the sky,
No water hemmed where now I lie.
Just bracken, bog, and cloud’s low roam —
The wind as his map, the hills he’d roam.
But I came later, carved and bound,
A basin sunk in hallowed ground.
The diggers came with iron teeth,
And I was born from stone beneath.
They built me not to silence song,
But help the parched as towns grew strong.
Yet still I feel what once had been —
A poet’s breath upon the wind.
The moor he walked was dark with coal,
Its veins ran deep beneath the knoll.
The picks rang out, the timbers strained,
As soot and sweat through seasons drained.
Above, the quarries split the stone,
Their scars now softened, overgrown.
Men carved the hill for hearth and home,
And left behind a world of loam.
His well remains along Foe Edge,
Built of stone, on shale and scree,
Where walkers stop and feel the air
That once stirred through his silver hair.
Though he and I have never met,
The earth remembers — and won’t forget.
His words are folded in the peat,
In every hill, in every beat.
The dry stone walls, the sheepfolds old,
The fields once shaped by hands grown cold —
They linger in my mirrored face
And give this place its rooted grace.
I do not mourn what came before,
Nor do I boast my modern store.
I am but part of this great chain —
The moor endures through loss and gain.
Its song is not of one alone,
But forged in turf and hewn in stone —
In coal-black seams, in quarry’s cry,
In curlew’s wail and storm-swept sky.
So when the mist rolls o’er my tide,
And curlews call the moorland wide,
Know that beneath this human mark
Still beats a land both fierce and stark.
And though I never saw him near,
In every wind, I feel him here.