Graham Bellinger
These are words from a song written in autumn 2001, thinking about the Offa's Dyke path which runs for 173 exhausting miles between Chepstow and Prestatyn through the Welsh border country. It certainly doesn't end at Chester as the song suggests, but my walks on parts of the path a/ways do end there - in a comfortable armchair or a hot bath.
The landscape along the way is largely one of huge open country, apparently unspoiled and largely empty, but in fact every inch of it has been shaped by man's actions and dramatic history. I thank goodness I live close to it.
Built to Last
From the Mersey and the Dee
To where the Severn meets the sea
I take this path each time I roam
And it always brings me home
This path it rises up to meet me
Then like a switchback slips beneath me
It soaks my skin but dries my tongue
Blowing fit to burst my lungs
This path it leaps, this path it falls
From Sedbury cliffs to Chester walls
No matter where I stop or start
I seem to find my heart
The path marks the old divide
Where armies clashed and outlaws ride
A no mans land of windy hills
Where war cries echo still
Now ivied walls and ruined keep
Shadow the grass beneath my feet
The summer field where I lay down
A broken army’s burial ground
The borderland is now at rest
It joins the Marches east and west
But still the past is close at hand
And written on the land
It stretches under ragged skies
Fills my heart, my mind, my eyes
It speaks to me of all it’s seen
Of where we’re bound and where we’ve been
The land now bears new scars of time
Empty farms and long closed mines
Boarded shops, no schools, no trains
But still this land remains
And as it reaches North and South
Wirral sands to Severn mouth
It bears the change and weathers storm
Like the path it carries on
I take this path and still it runs
After this hill another one
Toward the future and from its past
This land was built to last
It stretches under ragged skies
Fills my heart, my mind, my eyes
It speaks to me of all it’s seen
Of where we’re bound and where we’ve been
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