The Edward Thomas Fellowship

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 417

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Sadly, trains no longer stop at Adlestrop, the station that is the subject of Edward Thomas’ best-known poem. That was lost to the Beeching axe in 1966, but there are plenty of other places where you can read his poems in the setting that they describe. Several of these have been linked by a circular walk, starting at the church of All Saints in Steep, the Hampshire village where Thomas and his family lived from 1906 until he was killed in action at Arras on 9 April 1917.

The Poet’s Stone, erected by poet John Masefield in 1937 to the memory of Edward Thomas. It stands near the summit of Shoulder of Mutton Hill.

Thomas is buried in Agny Military Cemetery, France, but is commemorated closer to home on the two village war memorials, and by two windows in All Saints church, which were designed and engraved by Laurence Whistler and unveiled by the poet R S Thomas in 1978, on the centenary of Edward Thomas’ birth. The walk takes in the waterfall that is the subject of his poem ‘The Mill-Water’ (‘Only the sound remains/Of the old mill;/ Gone is the wheel;/On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns’, as well as the coombes, the ancient tracks, the aspens, and the beech hangers that feature in his work, plus his memorial stone on Shoulder of Mutton Hill from which you can view ‘sixty miles of South Downs at one glance’.

‘Water that toils no more’ (from ‘The Mill-Water’): all that is now left of the mill at Steep, ‘where once men had a work-place and a home’.

It is thanks to the work of the Edward Thomas Fellowship that so much of the patchwork of woodland and small fields known and loved by Thomas has been protected. (It is all now within the UK’s newest National Park, the South Downs, which officially came into being on 1 April 2010.) As well as campaigning against potentially damaging developments, as roads and housing estates creep inexorably outwards from nearby Petersfield, the Fellowship leads an annual birthday walk (on the nearest Sunday to 3 March) visiting places associated with Edward Thomas. During the rest of the year, it organises seminars, concerts, recitals of his poetry and prose, writing competitions, and a biennial Literary Festival.

The view from Shoulder of Mutton Hill over the coombe described by Thomas (in ‘Wind and Mist’) as ‘A hollow land as vast as heaven’.

Members also help to run the Edward Thomas Study Centre at Petersfield Museum, with its large and growing collection of portraits of Thomas, paintings of the landscapes he celebrated, and books about the poet and his contemporaries (Fellowship members enjoy the right to borrow some of these books for reading at home).

Further information: https://edward-thomas-fellowship.org.uk
Images: Kate Owen
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