BACK TO THE BORDERLANDS

POET CHRIS TOWERS, AUTHOR OF "HINTERLANDS, TAKES A TRIP TO THE CRABBLE ATHLETIC GROUND TO WATCH DOVER ATHLETIC TAKE ON FA CUP GIANT KILLERS MAIDSTONE UNITED...

- CHRIS TOWERS

ONE doesn't always hear classical guitar playing from a speaker under a bench in a town square. Many of the shops were boarded up but the music brightened things in an unexpected way.

But that is what I observed and heard as I tucked into scrambled egg, salmon, and bacon in a cafe in the middle of Dover in early March. Why was I there? To see a National League South match and to write a poem and a report for my second book 'Hinterlands', to be published in the late summer or early autumn. Poems based about the games and places of NonLeague.

A lover of Non-League football and poetry makes me part of many people's 'hinterlands', just not part of their world, but so be it for I find the less trodden places more interesting than the familiar.

Walking the white cliffs of Dover on the Friday, I looked over the channel and recalled childhood ferry trips to France on overseas holidays and that sense of being thrilled at ventures to new places.

'Hinterlands' are places in between places, often places ignored and there was a feeling that this place has been ignored. Maybe Dover may struggle to attract business and a team in this part of England may struggle to attract players, being so isolated. Dover is a hinterland as well as a borderland.

This trip had echoes of my trip to see the New Saints in Oswestry, written of in an article last autumn for this very same magazine. That place, like this, was and is a borderland but the borders there were between England and Wales, this was between England and the wider continent.

The sky was grey as I found my way to the ground, armed with pen and paper and a thirst for the game in places far and wide. The ground was a couple of miles from the town and tucked away between a rugby ground and a main road, bordered by the same chalk hills of the famous white cliffs. The main stand was large and inviting, the other side of the chalk hills.