You can read the text of this poem here, and you can listen to John Ireland’s glorious setting of it here.

One of the poetry groups I facilitate recently had as its topic “mountains”, and (among other things) I took the text of this wonderful song. I was, for some reason, quietly pleased to discover that the person who included it on their blog (which is where you’ve just read it) had, like me, discovered it at choir practice. Perhaps what pleases me is that sense of community and connection, across time and miles.

Anyway, this poem doesn’t mention the joys of the high- or mid- altitude cheese sandwich, but I really prize its celebration of what we find in hills: a place of stillness, a sense of that which never changes. No matter what our intellectual understanding may be that these, too, shall pass, it’s hard to feel that when you are out in the hills. Kirkup’s poem has a very simple vocabulary and unfussy style. It’s not saying anything particularly complicated—but I reckon it will resonate with most if not all of us who go out into them there hills. ‘They are both god and temple’: places to be revered and treasured; places which offer nourishment and refreshment; and places where we can reconnect with our own ‘profounder rivers’.