Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast

On a fell above Buttermere, a mountain is quietly coming apart. This is Haystacks — Alfred Wainwright's favourite fell in all of Lakeland, the one he asked to be scattered upon when he died. In 1991, near the tarn called Innominate, he was. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks a question that follows every walker eventually: is anything ever truly lost, or does it only change its form? The guest poe...

Some towns are built to do one thing. Cleator Moor was built to dig iron. Beneath this small West Cumbrian town runs hematite — the rich red ore that, in the nineteenth century, turned a quiet rural settlement into a boom town almost overnight, so busy and so Irish it was known for a time as "Little Ireland." Then the ore ran out. The mines were capped. The work was shipped to the coast and never...

Beneath the streets of Camborne, the engines once roared. This was the capital of the Cornish mining world — the town of Richard Trevithick and the Camborne School of Mines, whose engineers sank shafts on every continent on earth. A place that genuinely changed the world. And a place that paid for it, in lungs full of dust and lives cut short in the dark. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks one of...

In 1770, Oliver Goldsmith stood in the ruins of a village and wrote its elegy. The mill was silent. The brook was choked with weeds. The people were gone — driven off their own land so a wealthy man could enlarge his private park. Ill fares the land, Goldsmith warned, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. He was describing one English village. He could have been descri...

In the autumn of 1817, exiled from England and on the run from a continent's worth of scandal, Lord Byron sat at a desk above the Adriatic and addressed the sea. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll! He had watched his reputation collapse, his marriage break, and a society close its doors against him. And in the ocean he found, with something close to relief, a force that had noticed none...

On a rocky water-edge in County Sligo, a young William Butler Yeats hears voices on the wind. They are not human voices. They are the faeries of Irish folklore, and they are calling a human child away — out of his mother's house, into the wild lakes and woods and waters, beyond the reach of a world that has grown too noisy with its grief. Come away, O human child, they sing, four times across the...

In a country churchyard at the close of the eighteenth century, a poet stops at a moss-covered headstone and reads a name no one has spoken aloud in a hundred years. The curfew tolls. The village dead sleep on beneath unread inscriptions. And Thomas Gray, looking down at the rude forefathers of the hamlet, makes one of the quietest, gravest claims in English poetry: that beneath these obscure ston...

In this episode, we step into the quiet power of locality — from Browning’s aching orchard to the gentle, truth‑telling streets of Bedale — and discover why the surface of a place can sometimes be the whole truth. We explore how a single parish can hold an entire universe, how the smallest details become the deepest poetry, and why noticing is an act of love. You’ll hear Robert Browning’s *Home Th...

In this must‑listen episode of Alden Carrow’s Poetry Podcast, Alden descends beneath the bright surface of things — from Tennyson’s abyssal Kraken to the steep, enclosing walls of Buttermere. Guided by the theme “the surface is a lie that holds the light,” Alden explores what lies beneath the calm, polished appearances we trust: the millennial darkness of the deep sea, the silted cold of a Lakelan...

In a small cottage in Nether Stowey, on a frozen February night in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sits beside his sleeping infant son and listens. The frost is performing its secret ministry, unhelped by any wind. The world is asleep. The world does not know it is being watched. In this episode, Alden Carrow asks the question that haunts every poet who has ever stood before something older than the...

On Wenlock Edge, the wood is in trouble. The Wrekin heaves under the gale, and A. E. Housman watches a wind so ancient it once tore through a Roman city — a city now lying in ashes beneath the same hill. Two thousand years of human trouble, and the wind has not noticed. In this episode, Alden Carrow walks from the Shropshire ridge to the heart of the Lake District, asking the same question Housman...

The sea left Grange-over-Sands quietly — season by season, the tide lost interest, the Spartina grass crept in, and a town built on the Victorian promise of salt air was left standing on its promenade, stiff-collared, looking out at a marsh where the water used to be. It is still waiting. In this episode, Alden Carrow explores the peculiar dignity of things that refuse to admit they are finished....

What lies beneath the motorway? Beneath the concrete, the glass, the endless digital noise of modern life — the ancient earth is waiting. Patiently. Permanently. And it has all the time in the world. In this episode of Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast, we explore one of the most profound and humbling ideas in all of literature — that geological and historical permanence quietly, stubbornly resists th...

Nothing leaves Hawkshead. Day drains from the square, but it doesn't disappear—it settles. Silence packs like silt into the lime. The memory of wool sweats from stone walls. Everything stays. Everything accumulates. The town has developed what I call the geological habit of standing exactly where we are. In this episode, we explore landscapes that refuse to transform—places that choose instead to...

**Stand at a train station platform. The guidebook says climb Orrest Head first—a gentle twenty-minute walk. You reach the summit. And suddenly, you're standing on compressed ocean mud, looking at fire.** **The best view of drama comes from the undramatic.** In this episode, we explore who gets to observe landscapes, how we observe them, and the beautiful irony that the most spectacular views of g...

Walk down a narrow ginnel in Ulverston. The walls are painted ochre, pastel blue—cheerful, tourist-ready. Look closer. Through the cracks, you can see the rubble-stone underneath. Industrial. Dark. Unforgiving. The grit persists underneath the paint. In this episode, we explore what endures when surfaces transform—from Hopkins' soaring falcon to a Cumbrian market town hiding its industrial bones b...

Join Alden Carrow, author of Cumbria In Verse – Lakes To Fells In Poetry, for an immersive exploration of the "Dominance of Fluidity and Constant Change". This episode journeys from the vertical heights of Cornwall to the horizontal expanses of the Anglo-Scottish border, uncovering how landscape poetry captures the friction between permanence and the "ever-changing tide". Featured in this Episode:...

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God." But what happens when that charge meets the crushing pressure of industry, geology, and time itself? In this episode, we explore violent transformation—from Hopkins' soot-blackened Victorian England to the collapsed volcanic caldera of Langdale Pikes. This is poetry forged under pressure, where beauty emerges from being crushed. Gerard Manley Hopkin...

What if the clothes you wear cost someone their life? In 1843, Thomas Hood wrote "The Song of the Shirt"—a brutal, rhythmic masterpiece that exposed the death-by-exhaustion of Victorian seamstresses. This wasn't poetry for poetry's sake. It was activism in verse. A woman sits in a freezing garret, stitching shirts until her fingers bleed, her eyes fail, and her body becomes a ghost. Hood's genius?...

**Episode 14 — But There Is No Road Through the Woods** Seventy years ago, they closed a road through the woods. Planted over it. Erased it from every map. And yet — the badgers still walk it. The atmosphere still carries the echo of horses' hooves. The land, it turns out, has a far longer memory than we do. We open with Rudyard Kipling's *The Way Through the Woods* — one of the most quietly extra...

Episode 13 – When the Map Runs Out of Ink What happens when human ambition meets a force that simply doesn't care? In this episode, we explore one of poetry's most electrifying themes: the tension between the world we impose upon the earth and the raw, indifferent power that quietly reclaims it. We begin in the Alps. Our guest poem is Percy Bysshe Shelley's monumental 'Mont Blanc,' written in 1816...

A journey through deep time, human smallness, and the quiet power of landscape. In this episode, Alden explores Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias through a geological lens—shifting the focus from fallen empires to the slow, patient forces of sand, wind, and stone. From there, he reads and unpacks his own poem, The Black Combe Outlier, a meditation on isolation, slate geology, and the strange comfo...

In this episode, Alden Carrow reads John Clare’s “The Flood” and explores how landscapes—both physical and digital—shape the way we live, write, and connect. Moving from Clare’s turbulent Northamptonshire waters to the tight stone throat of Ambleside in the Lake District, Alden reflects on constriction, flow, and the pressures that carve both valleys and creative lives. You’ll hear a full reading...

In this immersive episode, Alden Carrow, author of Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor, invites you to step onto the oldest stage in existence: nature itself. The Cosmic Voice: Ralph Waldo Emerson We begin with a sweeping exploration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "Song of Nature". Moving beyond the idea of nature as a passive backdrop, Alden reflects on the Transcendentalist belief that the environment is...

In this episode of the podcast, host Alden Carrow—author of Cornwall In Verse – Tide To Tor In Poetry — explores the thin lines between the known world and the realm of myth. This show focuses on slowing down to discover the poetry living in both the extraordinary and the everyday. Stepping Into the Mist: John Keats The journey begins with a guest poem from the Romantic era: John Keats’ "La Belle...