John Simpson Memorial Lecture: WALKING GLOUCESTERSHIRE WITH IVOR GURNEY

ELEANOR RAWLING is giving this year’s lecture on Tuesday 12th November at 6.45pm in the large lecture theatre TC001 on Francis Close campus, University of Gloucestershire.

A geographer, educationist and writer of two books on the local poet Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Rawling is this year’s guest speaker for the John Simpson Memorial Lecture. She will draw on both Gurney’s written archive and information about the geology and local landscapes that inspired his poetry.

John Simpson was a former colleague in Landscape Architecture having joined the course at the Pittville Art School in the 1960s. The memorial lecture series commemorates his contribution to that course over many years, notably in student admissions and teaching construction, surveying and planning law.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) is best known as a musician and First World War poet but he also wrote vividly and prolifically about his native Gloucestershire, finding inspiration and joy in walking the countryside and expressing its different moods. ‘Out in the morning / For a speed of thought I went’ (Old Times)

In her latest book, Walking Gloucestershire with Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Rawling draws on his poetry and letters to follow his footsteps through the landscape. The 20 circular walks not only illuminate Gurney’s life and creativity but provide opportunities for readers to explore their own relationship to a rapidly changing countryside. Confined to a mental asylum for the last 15 years of his life, Gurney’s later poems are often cries of absence and loss in which the poet wanders ghost-like through the Cotswold Hills and Severn Meadows of his youth.   ‘The empty joys of wasted air / That blow on Crickley and whimper wanting me’ (What Evil Coil)

Eleanor’s presentation will include why she wrote the book, tracing the connections between walking and creativity, the experiences of being ‘in-place’, local case studies and some wider reflections on his life and legacy.

Eleanor Rawling is a writer, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an educationist (Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education 1991–2023). She is Newsletter Editor of the Ivor Gurney Society and has led numerous walks in Gurney’s Gloucestershire. Having been born and brought up in Gloucestershire, she has a passion for its landscapes and places.