FOOTPRINTS IN MUD

 

 

One of my interests is armchair archaeology – it has to be armchair, I’m afraid, my days of kneeling in a wet trench, scraping away are long gone!

I am fascinated by the way ordinary people lived.   Emperors, Kings etc. leave me cold.   So when a while ago I read about some footprints which had been found down in Wales, I was hooked.   It was somewhere on the coast in mid-Wales at a place called Borth.   No human habitation had been found there before, so it was all very exciting.

If you want to read about it yourself, it is here.   One of the footprints was a child’s, aged about four years old they thought, and that really got to me!   I wonder what that child was doing there?   The coast was actually a long way further out then, and the child was on a salt marsh, where there is mud, interspersed with grass etc.

 

This is a photograph of the footprints.   They are about 4,000 years old

 

One of my other interests is writing, and I belong to a Creative Writing Group.   We have different subject each fortnight to write on, and this time it was – guess – footprints!   so I wrote the following poem, which I hope you will enjoy.   I know the footprint could have been either a boy or a girl, but for the purposes of my poem, he’s a lad!

FOOTPRINT

What was his name?  That little lad

Who stood in the mud

At Borth

Four thousand years ago

 

Was he lost, that little lad

Tears just welling in his eyes

His thumb in his mouth, as he stood

In the mud,

At Borth

Four thousand years ago.

 

Did he wander, that little lad

Away from his brother, his mother and dad

As he stood in the mud

At Borth

Four thousand years ago.

 

Was big brother holding his hand, that little lad

As he stood in the mud

At Borth

Four thousand years ago.

 

He left his print,

he feels so near

we stretch out our hand

to that little lad

Who stood in the mud

At Borth

Four thousand years ago

 

I hope my Group like it!