Remains of Elmet

Ted Hughes

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571279920
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

'The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to
the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for
criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in
textiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since
1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end
has come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long,
is changing rapidly.' Ted Hughes, Preface to Remains of Elmet (1979)

Ted Hughes's remarkable 'pennine sequence' celebrates the area where he spent his early childhood. It mixes
social, political, religious and historical matter - a tapestry rich in the personal and poetic investment of a
landscape that both creates and is inured to its people, whose moors 'Are a stage for the performance of heaven.
/ Any audience is incidental.' Remains of Elmet is one of Hughes's most personal and enduring achievements.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Publisher’s Note
• Six years into her posthumous life
• Prefatory piece by Ted Hughes
• Table of Contents
• Where the Mothers
• Hardcastle Crags
• Lumb Chimneys
• These Grasses of Light
• Open to Huge Light
• Moors
• The Trance of Light
• It Is All
• Long Screams
• Curlews in April
• Curlews Lift
• Hill Walls
• Walls
• First, Mills
• Hill-Stone was Content
• Mill Ruins
• Wild Rock
• The Sheep Went on Being Dead
• The Big Animal of Rock
• Tree
• Heather
• Rock Has Not Learned
• Remains of Elmet
• There Come Days to the Hills
• Dead Farms, Dead Leaves
• When Men Got to the Summit
• Churn-Milk Joan
• Grouse-Butts
• High Sea-Light
• The Weasels We Smoked Out of the Bank
• A Tree
• Bridestones
• Where the Millstone of Sky
• Spring-Dusk
• Football at Slack
• Sunstruck
• Willow-Herb
• The Canal’s Drowning Black
• The Long Tunnel Ceiling
• Under the World’s Wild Rims
• Two
• Mount Zion
• The Ancient Briton Lay under His Rock
• Rhododendrons
• Crown Point Pensioners
• For Billy Holt
• Heptonstall
• You Claw the Door
• Emily Brontë
• Haworth Parsonage
• Top Withens
• The Sluttiest Sheep in England
• Auction
• Widdop
• Light Falls through Itself
• In April
• The Word that Space Breathes
• Heptonstall Old Church
• Tick Tock Tick Tock
• Cock-Crows
• Heptonstall Cemetery
• The Angel
• Note (included in Three Books, 1993)
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright