Finding peace in KaZulu-Natal and the Highlands of Scotland

KwaZulu-Natal and Home

Back in England from the glories of KwaZulu-Natal, two memories linger most vividly: a quiet Methodist service in a small chapel, and the exuberant pottery of the world-famous Ardmore Ceramic Art, founded some forty years ago to support local, underprivileged artists. The result has been a truly African outpouring of creativity.

Both chapel and studio sit amid lush pasture, grassy hills and ancient forests rich in wildlife: parrots, cuckoos, snakes and the charming dassies, those rock rabbits whose nearest relative is the elephant.

The sermon, on loving our enemies, was deeply moving in this embattled land where supporters of the ousted and deeply corrupt former president, himself a Zulu, still cause unrest. The landscape itself carries turbulence. At Isandlwana the British Army suffered one of its greatest defeats; nearby Spioenkop saw ferocious fighting in the Boer War, remembered for its terrible density of death.

And then home, to the gentler downlands of Wiltshire, to making videos and helping rescue an ancient church.

The Saxon Church

The church is over a thousand years old, Saxon they say; quiet and rustic, its pulpit so near one feels no need to polish oneself before entering. Farmers’ hands, men of soil and beasts and butterflies, have prayed for rain and mourned their dead within its narrow walls. It is a holy place, simple and enchanted.

This church stands in a Wiltshire village once famous for crop circles that drew international curiosity. Now it faces quieter troubles. After a major restoration and the resignation of the entire Parochial Church Council, paint and plaster began peeling from the ancient walls, revealing fragments of medieval and Anglo-Saxon decoration. The discoveries are extraordinary, but the cost of preserving them is immense and funds are scarce.

We have been selling cards pairing paintings by the artist Anna Simmons with extracts from my poems. They have proved unexpectedly popular.

I know a placewhere the peace of God descends like a cloud,too quiet for sound, too near for speech…

In these dark times, threatened by war and climate change and wearied by the after-effects of lockdown, I feel passionately that the church still has much to offer: hope instead of anger, forgiveness instead of regret, the steady comfort of two thousand years of prayer.

A Lichen Stone in the Highlands

Next came Glenshee — the “Valley of the Fairies” — in the Scottish Highlands, wild and haunted, rich with memory. People have lived among these glens for four thousand years. Legends cling to the soil.

Hope

Sadness falls from the sky like tears,

then a ray of light turns them to pearls…

hope that is always here,

in God, in life, in beauty everywhere.

In April 2025, walking those hills, I felt that mingling of sorrow and redemption that only high places seem to give.

The Bee

One morning I opened my shack and saw a bee clasped motionless to the door, gold and black in the cold. I touched him gently; he moved. Another clung to my fingertip before I brushed him away.

So must I keep moving. It is not yet time to die, though three score years and ten are long past and my limbs grow weaker in the dusk. Here among mountains grim and spare — bees, ravens, barking deer, foxes, moss and lichen, wild blueberries pushing bravely into the cold air — I must stand tall and give thanks for life. Like the bee, I cling on, waiting for the sun.

On a journey further north I met a former diplomat and Chinese scholar who recited a poem from the Sung Dynasty, translating as he went. Ancient Mandarin, he explained, was spare and precise, each line pared to its essence.

My attempt to recall it:

Sad Story

Buds

Floating

Peach blossoms

Dark rivers of joy

Empty cave

Bitter tears

Death

Alas, I cannot remember it fully. Yet the fragments linger, like Coleridge’s vision of “sunny domes” and “caves of ice” — beauty half grasped, half lost.

From Africa’s battlefields and chapels to Wiltshire’s Saxon stones, from Highland bees to ancient Chinese verse, the thread is the same: memory, fragility, and hope enduring in unlikely places.