Lording over the moors and valleys, visible out to sea
Bold Dunkery, crowned with cairns ancient and modern
Your summit cairn is in summer twilight crowned by larking lads
Come to watch the sunset, yet cheated by horizon hugging cloud
They revel in unexpected solitude at a well trodden spot
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
It was lovely up at Dunkery Beacon in the twilight.
A watercolour painting of the eastern end of Blue Anchor beach, near Exmoor. This is where we have collected many fine fossils. Painted in 2016 — the rocks have been battered by further winter storms and look a bit different this year.
Twisted Thorn trees near the ruins of Badgeworthy village on Exmoor.
A watercolour of the sun setting behind Dunkery Beacon, painted from the fields around our favourite holiday cottage.
Only Exmoor stretches out to embrace the whole sky in its immensity
Reflects its moods and colours, its nurture and destruction
Only the moor is as fickle as the sky
Today the moor is swallowed as clouds subsume the uplands
Yesterday it shed water like the clouds themselves
Tomorrow it will shimmer with heat, dry and unforgiving
Trees hide in hollows, afraid to stand in the open
Sheep bones litter the spring hillsides
Peaty silty bogs nestle with gorse , bracken and heather
Only Exmoor reaches out to bleed the very rain from the sky
To lie seeming gentle with its folds and billows, green fields abutting the heather
Then to gladly accept the gifts of deadly snow, killing floods, baking heat
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
This poem first appeared in Peacock Journal earlier this year.
A lovely colourful Tractor that I just had to paint!
Herepath
Wide as ten men abreast
The old military road
Cuts between farms
Dips down to the river
Rises up over the moor
Rabbits lollop along it
Lambs bleat in fields beside it
Rosebay glows at sunset
Where were the wars that you marched to?
What were the victories that you won?
Here on the old Herepath
The road truly goes ever on
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
I’m very pleased to have a poem in the latest issue of the excellent “Three Drops from a Cauldron”. My poem was inspired by a hut circle above a tiny valley on Exmoor.
Welcome to Issue 11, the first one of 2017, and the changeover issue to our now-monthly, new-format web journal.
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Crying the moor
Sedge and moss, peat and grass
Cover the uplands
Sheep run from us, cattle simply watch
Clouds scud past, rain threatens
Stone track turns to muddy path
As we descend to the combe
Past the ruins, past the ponies
Towards the burble of falling water
The fluidity that carved the hill folds
The agent that governs this landscape
Made manifest in Hollocombe Water
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Exmoor Evening
Bone cold moon lifts over a sheep fold
Lights fleeces
Illuminates walkers breasting the darkening hill
Who pause to watch the suns display
As its fire sinks behind Dunkery Beacon
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
