When wind swings peppers round
their walls these ruins sing;
and in tune too.  To me they sound
like bygone Sundays.  If you stand
and lean where jagged coping brings
the sky-light in, I know your hands
will feel the warmth those stones have saved
up slowly through a century and more
of summers and let leak out in these raw,
rain-coloured days.

One’s gone now.  Once its quoins
were bluestone tenors.  There,
in winters that I knew, it joined
in harmony with these and told
its history to the wind.  The air
held smells of pepper-trees and cold
as it does now.  Then people found
it stood on profit.   But our Celtic past
has guardians here.  They photographed the blast
that tore it down.