John Lindley
The Kelsall Maze
Delivered through a rock's cleft to a green cradle,
this is a place by-passed and bubbling under,
a village of capped wells, staunched springs and culverted brooks
where the well of Dog Moor blinks the last dry eye in the place.
It is a village the road reached and rescinded,
where the railway forgot to stop but the pub didn't.
It is a place where Romans came conquering from the sea
and their ancestors returned in captivity and defeat,
where the early Christmas gift of a flying bomb
whistled off the North sea, fell silent and then murmured evermore,
where the draining labours of POW's
at Helsby and Frodsham Marsh support a motorway,
It is a place of cryptic and conundrum,
of stories checked, unchecked and crosschecked,
of a Boot pronounced Cat, of a steamroller's free-fall
and a Cheshire German wall built by Italians,
of an Urchin's Kitchen that served no food
and of Thirty Nine steps that number more.
It is a place where colliding churches combine,
where a chalice a century gone returns from the war,
where Little Switzerland rises in Cheshire's sap,
where the Round House lock-up holds nothing but interest,
where a cornfield sprouts an aerial of wood
and the Safety Pin Man walks backwards.
It is a village whose east was taken in like an orphan,
one where the boundaries of a demoted road blur
and the truth of its right and wrong side is contested,
the elevation of geography and salary denied.
It is a place that fire could not melt, where fruit would not sour
and where a lollypop could stop traffic but not a bridge.
Here, where the centre is a place of meat and honey,
is 'scattered village' past and township wannabee -
the microcosm of a city spelt out in the initials WI and CCTV
where the young are a blind spot on a bad bend,
where the middle drops out or drops away
and a top heavy community teeters and tuts.
Here now, in a land long contested by sea, a land
where steam engines once spat with the water of Spencer's Pump,
where Trojans carried tea and the books bus through,
where mists haunt the memory of misunderstood marshes
to a fox's howl and Hindswell Gutter courses with myth;
here, as the bell from the Crimea shivers the Sunday air
is a place flaunting flood and assimilation,
where the waters below were tamed but those from above threaten still,
where the unwalled reach of Chester snaps at the heel.
Here is a village unpacking its past and unpicking its present;
a place of sandstone and a place of grit
whose heart won't be by-passed, whose voice will be heard.
Written for the 'Spotlight on Kelsall' performance as part of a week long residency in that village for The Rural Touring Network |