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Song of The Ridgeway

by Helen Melon & Lisa Quartey

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about

This song was written on pilgrimage with Listening to the Land; Pilgrimage for Nature, in September 2021.
The Ridgeway is an ancient chalk trackway that runs E-W across southern England for 87 miles.
For thousands of years people and their animals have travelled this way across the land, and today it is a long-distance hiking route.
In 2021 twenty-five people began our pilgrimage from London to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in a heatwave of 30 degrees. This included a section of the Ridgeway, from the Goring Gap to the Uffington White Horse, before turning north.
I looked on the industrial-sized, scraped and baked surfaces of the surrounding fields of stubble, with no shade in sight, and wondered: are we on the right track?!
This song is my conversation with that old landscape.
On September 1st this year Lisa and I set out again on The Ridgeway, together with a handful of those pilgrims, to walk some of the St Michael & St Mary Way in the name of 'Pilgrimage for Unity'.

lyrics

On The Ridgeway in the sun
September has begun
with a scorching Summer's breath
And the fields here are so wide
that my heart, it shrinks inside
to see the land so bereft
of the hedgerows, of the trees
we give thanks for every breeze
that makes good this body's sweat
See the ones who came before
herding flocks across the moor
their work is done
we're not done yet....
Oh the hedgerows, oh the trees
we give thanks for every breeze
that makes good this pilgrim sweat
see the ones who came before
herding flocks across the moor
their work is done...
we're not done yet
Won't you take me in your arms
and remember all my charms
I am old and I am scarred
Who will love me if not you?
What you've done, you can undo
Take me with you in your heart....

credits

released August 29, 2022
Helen melon: lyrics & music, instruments & vocals
Lisa Quartey: vocals

Thanks to:
Alice McCabe for facilitating a recording space for 'choir' section with Laurie Gane, who let us use his studio space, guitar and percussion instruments on beautiful Anglesey.
Alice McCabe: photo of 'Listening to the Land' pilgrims on The Ridgeway 2021

Big thanks to ALL the pilgrims, who sang and played in the original 'live' version of this song, all the way to the COP26 in Glasgow, especially Alice, who sang with us from week 1, Jim who played whistle, Dan who played guitar, Scarlet and Kate on harmony vocals, and Howard on ukulele.

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helen melon London, UK

a lifetime befriending the wild horses of intuitive folk...
helen melon's songs have been making young men cry since the last century

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