There is no other English county quite like Shropshire. A. E. Houseman wrote of it, yet rarely ever visited it. In the early 1960's as a young man I read the poems of Houseman and the short 'country matter' stories of A E Coppard, and visited Shropshire a neighbouring county to my own Worcestershire. In west Shropshire was a trout stream, where the wild trout went 2 to the pound mostly, with the odd leash going on 40 ounces.

The river was a prodigious producer of trout and a paradise for young fly fisher such as I.

I was a 'dryfly' man and the fish on the Onney came well to the surface fly such that on one never to be repeated day June 12 1966, during a heavy emergence of mayfly I took Thirty Five trout to surface fly, returned every one alive and carried on fishing into the evening.

At Halford on the Onney where the West and East Onney meet there was a triangular shaped meadow full of flowers. I used to take lunch there and often fell asleep in a place where no one had come it seems since the beginning of the century. Across the river from where I lay was a Damson orchard. One of the old trees was a sentinel post for an itinerant Cuckoo who sang me to sleep.

It seems that since then I measured every place I fished in the world with that topmost beat of the river Onney. I guess I am still searching to hear the sound of that cuckoo. This poem is about that time.

O let me go before I die
To that wooded vale
And those rolling dales of West Shropshire
Just where the pretty Onney streamlet flows
And one could always suppose to catch a trout
But not much before May be out
The Onney was always a late river
Not that much use
And certainly no excuse
Before Pentecost

O let me lie again
In the cool long grass
Above Halford bridge
Just where the two rivers meet
A rather neat confluence of West and East
Crystal clear on normal days
Yet with a peaty stain after rain
Then the trout at its fining down
Came to dry fly
Just as soundly as ever

O I oftimes sigh
To the lord on high
Take me again to that plain
Triangular field at Onney meet
where a Plethora of meadow flowers
Repeat and repeat this painted England
Where there you could lay all the day
And listen to the sound of the silence
Be transformed  to a place  and time
Where the pace of commerce
was nothing worse
Than the speed of a horsedrawn Haywain