Cheddar Man, Cheese Caves & Christina Rossetti's Up-Hill | The Unchanging Room

What do you do with the ten thousand years underneath your feet, while half a million pairs of shoes wear the path above it smooth? We begin in 1858 with Christina Rossetti's Up-Hill—a poem built as pure dialogue, one voice growing more anxious with every question, the other never once changing its temperature. Rossetti's first appearance on the show, and overdue. Then we descend into Cheddar—a village pinned between a limestone scarp and the water table, where a quarry takes the cliff back by the tonne, half a million tourists a year polish the gorge trails to a slip, and a few metres below all of it, Cheddar Man has rested in the same fixed cold as maturing wheels of cheese for ten thousand years. Nothing above ground touches it. This week's practical work—The Unchanging Room: how to tell the difference between the parts of a poem that should wear down through revision, and the one image at the centre that should never move. Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.