New Trackways
I.
We once
walked lightly
on the wooden trackways
of brash and planks of old oak.
We knew the bog was not bottomless
but the otherworld, beneath, is,
feared to provoke its spirits.
II.
Our steps
became heavier
when we went to collect
the turves,
widening
the padways
for the wheels
of horse and cart.
The track to Helleholes
rickety, ballasted
with prayers
and apotropaic
symbols to ward off
the boggarts, the denizens of Hell.
III.
Heavier,
heavier still
when we built the tracks
for the trains steaming from the depths of the inferno.
On the uncrossable bog, where everything sunk,
no amount of spoil reached the bottom.
The engineers reverted to old ways -
bales of heather, brushwood,
floated the train track.
Its lightness
carried the engines,
heavy loads of night soil
to dump on the peat, make it
fertile, productive, agricultural…
Severed the mossland in two -
spirits cut in twain, oozing curses,
twisted hellish laments.
IV.
And still
we are severing
peatlands, woodlands,
with tracks for engines claimed to be
so light, so fast,
ignoring the spirits
who will one day rise
to take their debts.
This poem is based on the ancient tradition of building wooden trackways over peat bogs and marshlands such as Sweet Track in Somerset and Kate’s Pad in Lancashire. These small developments, having little impact on the landscape and wildlife, are contrasted with the building of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway across Chat Moss, severing it in two, in 1829, and the current damage being done by HS2.
Helleholes is the name of a peat pit on the now-drained Penwortham Moss a couple of minutes walk from my home.
The image is ‘View of the railway across Chat Moss’ by Henry Pyall (1833) courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Lorna Smithers
is a poet, author, awenydd, Brythonic polytheist, and devotee of Gwyn ap Nudd. Her three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls are published by the Ritona imprint of Gods & Radicals Press. Based in Penwortham, Lancashire, North West England, she works as a conservation trainee restoring Lancashire’s precious peatlands. She blogs at ‘From Peneverdant’.