The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of
the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the
world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as
well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local
generations are carved into the region s abounding rocks. Simon Armitage
was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was
commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write
site-specific poetry. Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine
walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver
Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved
into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems
and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. The many layers of stone and
sediment found beneath the surface of the rock reflect the drama of the
landscape itself. Covered in decades of industrial soot and grime, the
colours released by the carver's tools will likely never return to
shades of black and grey, but become a small reminder of the changes
that our natural environment undergoes, and the marks, small and large,
of humankind."
