A society dedicated to rural poet John Clare has commissioned a tree to be planted in his memory at a nature reserve near Clare’s village of Helpston in Cambridgeshire.   

The Langdyke Countryside Trust established Swaddywell Pit nature reserve in 2003. It was the site of a quarry from Roman times onwards. Clare dedicated two poems to Swaddywell; in one he writes about the quarry in the first person, lamenting the fate that has befallen the land. In the penultimate verse of the poem, he writes:

 

And if I could but find a friend

With no deceit to sham

Who’d send me some few sheep to tend

And leave me as I am

To keep my hills from cart and plough

And strife of mongrel men

And as a spring found me find me now

I should look up agen

 

The John Clare Society has commissioned two other trees to be planted at Swaddywell; one dedicated to first world war poet Edmund Blunden, who did much to bring Clare’s poetry to a 20th century audience. The third is in honour of Dr Ronald Blythe, president of the John Clare Society from its inception in 1981 until his retirement last year.