The Domesday Book Entry For High Legh Village
It is as simple as notes of sheep wool
across barbed wire staves.
“Wulfgeat and Dot held it as 2 manors;
they were free men.”
Two manors: even then High Legh carried
the seed of morse hamlets coded over
a few square arable miles.
“A priest and a church, with 1 villager
and 2 smallholders”
You puzzle over a congregation of three
and idle on until ambushed.
“1 of Gilbert’s men has ½ plough
and 3 slaves.”
At seven on Good Friday morning
the A50’s air was empty, an almost trucial quiet
over Avenues and Walks in the joggerless estate,
the white Bear’s Paw Inn and muckless
converted barns, brown brick cottages
flaunting yellow garden slides,
the bungalows of farmers tired of muck.
A question elbows into the silence:
where, once,
in all this openness and hedged-about coping,
was the last sentence in the entry?
What would now be choked
by the wood
three miles long and a mile and a half wide,
the trunks pile-driven through kitchens,
branches puncturing poster-covered walls,
thickets upturning Range Rovers,
the canopy’s blind migraine?