Carole Evans

Whenever I visit friends in Broxwood, a tiny place near Leominster, I always sleep soundly. The locals say it’s the trees, but it is also the soothing beauty of the Welsh Marches – that stretch of green and pleasantness embracing Shropshire and Herefordshire. A hundred years ago a melancholic A.E. Housman called it ‘the land of lost content’. Today’s Shropshire Lad, Julian Critchley, described it as ‘a land to be enjoyed’ in his book Borderlands. For me, the gentle rolling hills, the valleys with their church spires rising above the morning mists, pretty timber-framed villages, stately oaks and screens of tall birch, the hop-yards and cider orchards, evoke a suitably English alternative to the mediaeval towers, the pines and cypresses, and the vineyards of Tuscany. The Marches are a landscape that invites rapture and sentimental thoughts of another England.