Fishing for Poems on the River Eden

"This leaf which is being persecuted by the wind,
Let her beware of her fate.
She is old though only born this year."

A while back, squeezing between tree roots along the banks of the Eden, we came across a beautiful quote carved into the rock. It is reputed to be the work of William Mounsey, an eccentric botanist. It turns out he carved a few things along Eden's banks, and recently, we set out to find one of his more eloquent ones. Of course, being Welsh, it was the vague rumour of an ancient Bardic poem by Llywarch Hen that was the lure.
An old Welsh poem did seem a very strange thing to carve in deepest Cumbria, but then again, maybe not. When Llywarch was penning his words of wisdom (early in the 9th century), Wales and Northern England were linguistically one.
Mounsey carved his eulogy to Llywarch on St. Constantine's caves, a series of monastic, multifunctional cells variously attributed to meditation, storage, and retreat from the dreaded moss-troupers...hmm..

The caves themselves were a curious mix of surprise and disappointment. Others had followed, rather less creatively, in Mounsey's footsteps and covered the walls with names, italics, childlike scrawls and finally, spray paint. It was madder than the walls of a mental institution.


The final act of vandalism was sprayed right in front of William's wonderfully sonorous poem, and laid claim to the fact that members of a certain eastern European immigrant community had been there.

It's interesting to chart the way that, over the course of human civilisation, drawing things on rock has gone from the ultimate expression of a timeless sprirituality to...well...something rather less profound.