Along part of the Eden Valley, near Kirkby Stephen, is the poetry path. It celebrates a year in the life of the hill farmers of Cumbria and is a series of large stones in which are carved poems by local poet M.R. (Meg) Peacocke. The poems are accompanied by carved motifs in brass by Pip Hall, which can be 'rubbed'. It's a treasure trove, albeit a muddy one on many days; a meander along the Eden looking out for the stones and reading the wonderful evocative verses - 'Snowlight peers at the byre door'; 'There sails the heron drawing behind him a long wake of solitude.' Fledgelings 'try small quivery leaps, testing the buoyancy of the air.'
Alice Oswald tracks the river Dart from its source to the sea, and at the river's birth sees 'eels in the glints, and in each eel a  finger-width of sea.' Then there's Norman Nicholson's late summer field, where 'dandelion clocks are held like small balloons of light above the ground.' Eilean Ni Chuilleanain picture Mary Magdalene at Marseilles looking over the marshes to the sea, where the water-weeds 'wait for the right time, then flip all together their thousands of sepia feet.' And, and and.....These, and so many, many others make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up with an excess of joy. Oh, why can't I be a poet? I write poetry, of course I do. It doesn't make me a poet any more than tootling on a recorder makes me a musician. I know about trochees and iambs, can construct a Shakespearean sonnet, toss off doggerel by the yard, have even had a couple of commissions from BBC Active for their schools' history programmes, and I run poetry workshops in schools - BUT that special amazing ability to create a piece of word-music to capture a sight, a sound, an idea in a way entirely new, just escapes me. I'd give my eye-teeth for that gift.
I did look at a course on writing poetry, but it began by asking everyone to wrap a scarf round their eyes and feel the world around them and try to describe it. Nah. That's not it. I wish I knew what 'it' was.