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Episode details

Radio 4,05 May 2016,25 mins

Tennyson's Lincolnshire

Open Country

Available for over a year

Helen Mark explores the Lincolnshire Wolds through the poetry of Victorian Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The Lincolnshire Wolds are a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, remote and in some ways little-changed since Tennyson was born here, in the village of Somersby, in 1809. Helen meets dialect speakers, like Tennyson, whose 'first language was Lincolnshire'. She'll find out how he might have described the landscape and how it appears in some of his dialect poems. She meets some rare farm animals that would have been familiar to him and visits a rookery he describes in his famous poem 'Maud'. We'll hear direct descendants of those very rooks! Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery.

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