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Episode details

Radio 3,07 Nov 2025,14 mins

SeriesEmpty Spaces

Jean Sprackland - Foxes' Castle, Somerset

The Essay

Available for over a year

Poet Jean Sprackland turns her gaze toward Foxes’ Castle, the ivy-clad ruin of an eighteenth-century farmhouse near her home in Somerset. Once filled with life and love, now a hollow of brick and wildlife, the house becomes a canvas for Jean’s meditations on grief, memory, and the way nature reclaims what humans leave behind. The series Empty Spaces explores the beauty and melancholy of abandoned places that still hold meaning. Each episode invites a poet to inhabit one site of their choosing and breathe imagination, memory, and lyricism back into the surroundings via poetry. Producer: Sean Allsop Executive Producer: Leonie Thomas Sound Mix: Mike Woolley An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 3

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