The Lament of Swordy Well (III)

Another view from July 2005

During the Second World War, Swaddywell was used as a bomb dump and after the war the site was filled and returned to agricultural land. Then during the 1980s it became a landfill site. In 1997, adding insult to injury, developers bought the site and turned it into the National Auto Showground with plans to host car rallies there.

When war their tyrant prices got
I trembled with alarms
they fell and saved my little spot
Or towns had turned to farms
Let profit keep an humble place
That gentry may be known
Let pedigrees their honours trace
And toil enjoy its own

The silver springs grown naked dykes
Scarce own a buch of rushes
When grain got high the tasteless tykes
Grubbed up trees bank and bushes
And me they turned inside out
For sand and grit and stones
And turned my old green hills about
And pickt my very bones

These things that claim my own as theirs
Where born but yesterday
But ere I fell to town affairs
I were as proud as they
I kept my horses cows and sheep
And built the town below
Ere they had cat or dog to keep
And then to use me so
(tbc)