It`s late June! What better poem than Edward Thomas`s most famous lines, set at the station featured in a GOC 50th anniversary event last year?

The poet celebrates  a rural idyll just before the Great War, experienced on a train  to Malvern from Paddington. Tragically, he died on the Western Front in 1917.

 

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

 

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

 

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire