Storm Wracked Sky

Cherry

By GlosKat

Mon, 27 Oct 2025
  • 81 reads
6 comments
 

Can you be drowned in a storm-wracked sky

As deep as a storm-wracked sea ?

Can you run aground on a pale full moon

And shelter in her lee ?

Certificate U
Poem
Nature

Comments

Submitted by GlosKat on

I lived for a couple of years in a cottage on Besbury Common, which is a limestone shelf just below Minchinhampton Common, in the 5 Valleys area near Stroud. Besbury Common was National Trust land with very few houses.  After dark the only lights I could see were those on the far side of the Golden Valley.

As a result, I became very aware of the moon. I always knew what phase she was in, and at night when it was full moon I could lie in bed and read by her light.  I realized why she was called 'The Parish Lantern' from the days when people could go out and tend to their crops (on which their lives depended) even in the middle of the night.

Looking at the moon and sky, with no light pollution to sully them, it was easy to imagine that I was the one in the sky looking down at the sea, with the moon as an island and the clouds as sea-mist..

Like most people I never see a sky without light pollution any more, and I consider that another loss of contact with the real world.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Many moons ago I would visit the area around Minchinhampton Common to cut the toenails of the aged and infirm. It was a beautiful place but sometimes even during the hours of daylight it could be a bit eerie. So I was always on my way before the rising ot the moon.

But a sky without light pollution is a wondrous thing wherever you are.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

Minch Common is certainly a spooky place.  Highest piece of (English) land south of the Lake District reputedly.  It certainly has a micro climate.  I remember once leaving Nailsworth down in the valley with nary a flake of snow, and driving up the W to find the kids on the common making snowmen. And my next door neighbour (ie half a mile away) on Besbury Common, a sensible and sober lady, saw the Gloucestershire black panther up there  A day later another neighbour (half a mile away in the opposite direction) found a ripped up deer at the spring in their garden. So a very unusual and special place to live, good to find someone else who knows it.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Oh I loved working in Gloucestershire though it only lasted about nine months in 2005. It was when I was starting out as a mobile chiropodist and I had a lot of empty space in my diary, I was approached by a chiropodist in Nailsworth who needed time off to have a baby so I stood in as a locum. I travelled up there one day per week from where I lived in Chippenham. 

The list of patients included some incredible old characters, including a man who had been the test pilot for Concorde at Filton in the 1960s. What made the task difficult for me was that in the villages none of the houses had numbers so to find these dear old souls I had to just locate the right street and knock on the first front door that I came to. Then whoever answered it always knew the person I was looking for and their whereabouts. 

Wotton-under-Edge and Berkeley (with its sinister looking redundant nuclear power station) were even eerier places that I had to visit on the periphery of the patch, so always at the end of a working day... as night was beginning to fall. 

The experience inspired me to read Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie. I got the impression that little had changed.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

I think you would like Norman Jewson's By Chance I Did Rove. It covers his reminiscences of Gloucestershire characters from when he met them starting in 1907, but going back in the memory of the characters to a hundred years before that.  As well as, obviously, the story of the Arts and Crafts movement, but I found the countryside characters a lot more interesting, especially as it's set in an area I used to know well.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll order a copy of that the next time I'm in England.

And I too have always found countryside characters more interesting. 

Turlough