Built to Last

From the Mersey and the Dee

To where the Severn meets the sea

I take this path each time I roam

And it always brings me home

This path it rises up to meet me

Then like a switchback slips beneath me

It soaks my skin but dries my tongue

Blowing fit to burst my lungs

This path it leaps, this path it falls

From Sedbury cliffs to Chester walls

No matter where I stop or start

I seem to find more my heart

 

The path marks the old divide

Where armies clashed and outlaws ride

A no mans land of windy hills

Where war cries echo still

Now ivied walls and ruined keep

Shadow the grass beneath my feet

The summer field where I lay down

A broken army’s burial ground

The borderland is now at rest

It joins the Marches east and west

But still the past is close at hand

And written on the land

 

It stretches under ragged skies

Fills my heart, my mind, my eyes

It speaks to me of all it’s seen

Of where we’re bound and where we’ve been

 

The land now bears new scars of time

Empty farms and long closed mines

Boarded shops, no schools, no trains

But still this land remains

And as it reaches North and South

Wirral sands to Severn mouth

It bears the change and weathers storm

Like the path it carries on

I take this path and still it runs

After this hill another one

Toward the future and from its past

This land was built to last

 

It stretches under ragged skies

Fills my heart, my mind, my eyes

It speaks to me of all it’s seen

Of where we’re bound and where we’ve been

 

Written in autumn 2001 as this album took shape and thinking about the Offa's Dyke path which runs for 173 exhausting miles between Chepstow and Prestatyn through the Welsh border country. It certainly doesn't end at Chester as the song suggests, but my walks on parts of the path always do end there - in a comfortable armchair or a hot bath.

The landscape along the way is largely one of huge open country, apparently unspoiled and largely empty, but in fact every inch of it has been shaped by man's actions and dramatic history. It is at the heart of all these songs - I thank goodness I live close to it.