Browse Items (17 total)

This text is an adaptation from the Old English poem 'The Ruin', which is preserved in the tenth-century Codex known as The Exeter Book. The Old English 'Ruin' describes a fallen and decaying city, and has sometimes been seen as an Anglo-Saxon…

The Ruthwell Cross is an Anglo-Saxon (or more properly Northumbrian) stone sculpture, dating from the eighth (or perhaps seventh) century, and now housed in Ruthwell parish church in Dumfriesshire, although it may have once stood outside. Runic…

Sometime in the early 1970s, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges visited his friend the poet (and later Borges' translator) Alistair Reid at St Andrews in Scotland. Various myths and legends have grown up around this visit in the oral tradition…

These are poems that take inspiration from the Old English Elegies, transferring them to twenty-first century contexts. They have been previously published in various UK poetry magazines.

This is a novel, a murder mystery set in Northumbria around the time of the arrival of Christianity. It's loosely based on the history of Escomb church in Durham. I wrote it a long time ago; I don't know about its quality, but it was the fruit of a…

Two illustrations for a story I began to write but didn't finish about an imaginary meeting of two cultures, Roman and Anglo Saxon.

The woman looking out over a Saxon village is from a Roman family
her child and husband are buried in the forest…

I wrote this poem after queuing to see the Staffordshire Hoard.

A poem inspired by a reading of the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Battle of Maldon'. This poem was first published in my 'New and Selected Poems' (Peterloo, 2005)

The poem is an attempt to personalise an Ango-Saxon warrior from the fragments of archeological material available.

A poem inspired by the Anglo-Saxon church of St Andrew at Greensted in Essex, parts of which are estimated to be over a thousand years old; it is possible that the site has been a place of Christian worship for 1,300 years. St Andrew's is the oldest…