Where a giant walked

You can see from Wales to Gloucestershire from The Wrekin

- Fiona Reynolds

MY visit to the Quantocks (A walk-ing life, November 10) sparked many thoughts about poetry and landscape, among which A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman’s famous collection of poems, features large. I often quote from it when I speak about beauty, drawing on the poignant stories of young men going to their deaths in the trenches of the First World War, a copy of A Shropshire Lad in their breast pockets. Often it’s ‘Into my heart an air that kills/from yon far country blows:/ What are those blue remembered hills,/what spires, what farms are those?’ Another is more dramatic: ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;/The gale, it plies the saplings double,/ And thick on Severn snow the leaves’.