The poet laureate Simon Armitage has written a poem called ‘Fugitives’ in a commission by the National Association for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act.

He gave the first public reading of the poem at the weekend, at the beginning of Landscapes for Life Week, in Arnside and Silverdale, on the border between Lancashire and Cumbria, adjoining Morecambe Bay, to an audience of local farmers, dry stone wallers, clog dancers, artists and children.

Armitage said:  “The relationship between poetry and the land in this country goes back to the very origins of poetic utterance and I’m proud to be making a contribution to that ongoing dialogue. There is no greater challenge for a contemporary laureate and geography graduate than to contribute artistically to a conversation about the natural world and the state of our planet, and to praise those things that are wonderful and of wonder.”

The 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act paved the way for the legislation to create the UK’s 46 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the first of which was designated in 1956 at the Gower Peninsula in south Wales.

 

FUGITIVES

by Simon Armitage

 

Then we woke and were hurtling headlong

for wealds and wolds,

blood coursing, the Dee and the Nidd in full spate

through the spinning waterwheels in the wrists

and over the heart’s weir,

the nightingale hip-hopping ten to the dozen

under the morning’s fringe.

 

It was no easy leap, to exit the engine house of the head

and vault the electric fence

of commonplace things,

to open the door of the century’s driverless hearse,

roll from the long cortège

then dust down and follow

the twisting ribbon of polecats wriggling free from extinction

or slipstream the red kite’s triumphant flypast out of oblivion

or trail the catnip of spraint and scat tingeing the morning breeze.

 

On we journeyed at full tilt

through traffic-light orchards,

the brain’s compass dialling for fell, moor,

escarpment and shore, the skull’s sextant

plotting for free states coloured green on the map,

using hedgerows as handrails, 

barrows and crags as trig points and cats’ eyes.

 

We stuck to the switchbacks and scenic routes,

steered by the earth’s contours and natural lines of desire,

feet firm on solid footings of bedrock and soil

fracked only by moles.

We skimmed across mudflat and saltmarsh,

clambered to stony pulpits on high hills

inhaling gallons of pure sky

into the moors of our lungs,

bartered bitcoins of glittering shingle and shale.

 

Then arrived in safe havens, entered the zones,

stood in the grandstands of bluffs and ghylls, spectators

to flying ponies grazing wild grass to carpeted lawns,

oaks flaunting turtle doves on their ring-fingers,

ospreys fishing the lakes from invisible pulleys and hoists,

the falcon back on its see-through pivot, lured from its gyre.

 

Here was nature as future,

the satellite dishes of blue convolvulus

tuned to the cosmos, tracking the chatter of stars,

the micro-gadgets of complex insects

working the fields, heaths tractored by beetles,

rainbowed hay meadows tipsy with mist and light,

golden gravel hoarded in eskers and streams.

 

And we vowed not to slumber again

but claimed sanctuary

under the kittiwake’s siren

and corncrake’s alarm,

in realms patrolled by sleepwalking becks and creeks

where beauty employs its own border police.

 

And witnessed ancient trees

affirming their citizenship of the land,

and hunkered and swore oaths, made laws

in hidden parliaments of bays and coves,

then gathered on commons and capes

waving passports of open palms, medalled by dog rose and teasel

and raising the flag of air.