Poetry Corner

Old Road

In a chaos of branches, between the polished ebony of yew-stumps and the cling of ivy, the haste of wood ants, and the must of rotting chestnut leaves,

trace a path traversed for longer than clock-hands have turned: by herdsman, drovers, traders, pilgrims...

whose footsteps, voices, echo in the yew fronds, are lost in mist, layered in the startle of deer; are confused by the meander of springs and shifting greensand, are bewildered by the silent work of fungi frilling trunks.

To journey down this holloway is to travel with peoples in their thousands, through years in thousands, to where you can chase those slow-blowing dreams, watch seeds, fluff of dandelions, twist, lift from their moon-faced clocks and drift away to future time obscured in branches that lace the path ahead.

Lizzie Ballagher

(The so-called 'Old Road' is an ancient drovers' road and holloway which both overlaps and interweaves with parts of the Pilgrims' Way and the North Downs Way. Much obscured by time, new transport modes, and neglect, it emerges at one of its most visible points from thickets in King's Wood near Canterbury.)