Month: January 2020

“One story in particular, about a sleeping lord and his army. There was a king, that’s what the poet had told Sarah one afternoon as he painted by the streams. A Welsh king and his army driven into the hills by Edward I. Beaten, but not killed and not captured, even though no one ever saw him or his army again. That, the poet had explained, was because they’d never come back from those hills. Thousands of men swallowed within the muscles of earth that formed Wales’s natural defences against her invaders. And they were still there. At this point the poet had paused in his painting, placed his brush into a cloudy jar of water, and leant closer to Sarah’s listening face. His voice dropped, so quiet she could barely hear him over the running of the streams. Yes, he’d whispered, still there. In the hills, deep inside them, buried under the peat, heather, gorse, rowan, bog-cotton, stone, and soil. Asleep. Not dead. Asleep. An entire army and their king, sleeping in the hills, ready to wake and defend the country in its hour of need. The sleeping lord and his sleeping army is what the poet had called them and as he’d described them, Sarah saw them: a glimmering seam of armour, chain mail, and swords, just as she’d seen in her history books at school. A rare ore of sleeping men, embedded in the hearts of the hills, waiting.”

- Owen Sheers, Resistance.