ARCHAEOLOGY... has been a life long passion. So it's not suprising that this is my favourite poem:- Hayfoot; strawfoot; the illiterate seasons Still clump their way through Somerset and Dorset While George the Third still rides his horse of chalk From Weymouth and the new salt cure Towards Windsor and incurable madness. Inland The ghosts of monks have grown too fat to walk Through bone-dry ruins plugged with fossil sea-shells. Thou shalt! Thou shalt not! In the yellow abbey Inscribed beneath the crossing the Ten Commandments Are tinted red by a Fifteenth Century fire; On one round hill the yews still furnish bows For Agincourt while, equally persistent, Beneath another, in green-grassed repose, Arthur still waits the call to rescue Britain. Flake tool; core-tool; in the small museum Rare butterflies, green coins of Caracalla, Keep easy company with the fading hand Of one who chronicled a fading world; Outside, the long roads, that the Roman ruler Ruled himself out with, point across the land To lasting barrows and long vanished barracks. And thatchpoll numskull rows of limestone houses, Dead from the navel down in plate glass windows, Despise their homebrew past, ignore the clock On the village church in deference to Big Ben Who booms round china dog and oaken settle Announcing it is time and time again To plough up the tumuli, to damn the hindmost. But hindmost, topmost, those illiterate seasons Still smoke their pipes in swallow-hole and hide-out As scornful of the tractor and the jet As of Roman road, or axe of flint, Forgotten by the mass of human beings Whom they, the Seasons, need not even forget Since though they fostered man, they never loved him. WESSEX GUIDEBOOK Louis MacNeice