Meeting a Poet Inspired by Upland Paths

A Notebook in the Hip Belt

Marian Troke has walked the same stretch of gritstone edge above the Hope Valley perhaps two hundred times, and she still stops every few hundred yards to write something down. She keeps a small waterproof notebook in the left hip-belt pocket of her rucksack, a stub of 2B pencil wedged into the spiral, and a spare in the lid in case the first goes over a wall. The pencil matters: ballpoint ink turns to blue soup in a wet map case, and it stiffens in the cold long before your fingers do.

I met her on a blowy Tuesday in late September, on the path that runs from Crowden towards the top of the Longdendale chain. She had stopped to let a pair of red grouse cross in front of her — not that they needed the courtesy. They went up in that explosive, clattering way they have, wings whirring, calling go-back, go-back, go-back, and she stood absolutely still, pencil moving, until the last one dropped behind a bank of heather.

She showed me the page afterwards. Four lines, one struck through, a small drawing of the bird's head in the margin. That is roughly how every poem of hers begins.

The Walk That Started It

She was not, she insists, a poet before she was a walker. She was a physiotherapist in Sheffield who took up hill walking in her forties to fix a bad back and found that the uplands did something to her attention. On a wet ascent of Bleaklow she watched a grouse sheltering under the lee of a peat hagg, feathers slicked flat, entirely unbothered by the weather that was ruining her day. She wrote it down. She wrote it down again on the next walk, and the next.

What began as notes became a discipline. Now the walk and the writing are the same activity. She plans routes by what she wants to see rather than by distance — a moorland edge in August for the heather and the young broods, a high col in January for the way snow sits in the peat gullies. If the poem does not come, the walk still counts. If the walk does not come, nothing does.

What the Grouse Gives Her

Red grouse are, on the face of it, unpromising material: brown, round, bad-tempered, and famously difficult to see until they detonate at your feet. Marian says that is exactly the point. They reward patience and punish hurry. You cannot chase a grouse into a poem any more than you can chase it across a moor.

Her published work — two slim collections, both from a small northern press — returns constantly to the same few images: the red wattle over the eye, the way a bird runs along a wall top rather than flying, the sudden silence after the covey goes up. She has a poem about a grouse in mist that is really a poem about her father. She has one about heather burning that has upset a few people at readings, which she takes as a compliment, sort of.

Other upland birds get a look in too. Curlew, golden plover, the odd ring ouzel on a boulder-strewn clough. But the grouse is her lodestar, because it belongs to the moor so completely and asks nothing of anybody.

How to Try It Yourself

She is generous with advice, and most of it is practical rather than poetic. If you want to carry a notebook onto the hills, here is how she does it:

• Write within ninety seconds. The image fades. Stop the moment something catches you, even mid-climb, even in the rain.
• Take a pencil. A 2B, sharpened at both ends, in a plastic wallet. Ink runs, freezes, and smears.
• Record the conditions. Wind direction, cloud, the smell of the peat. These details are what make the writing ring true later.
• Do not tidy up on the hill. Scribble. Shape it at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and an Ordnance Survey map open beside you.
• Note the grid reference. She marks every poem with one. It is her filing system, and it takes her straight back.

Reading the Weather, Reading the Poem

Marian walks in all seasons but writes differently in each. Spring is for listening — curlew bubbling over the moor, the first grouse chicks like bumblebees in the cotton grass. Summer is for colour, though she warns that the heather's purple is a trap for lazy writing. Autumn is her best season: birds in packs, the light low and long, the moors smelling of wet bracken and gunpowder. Winter she calls the honest season, when the uplands stop being picturesque and simply become cold.

Her rule for cold days is simple: write the poem you can write, not the one you planned. A frozen hand produces short lines. She has come to like them.

Walking the Poems

She would rather you found your own routes than followed hers, but she admits to a few favourites. The edge path above the Longdendale reservoirs, quiet on a weekday and rich in grouse. The moorland track out of Langsett towards the Derwent watershed, where the heather is managed and the birds are thick on the ground from August. And the long pull up onto Kinder from Edale, hard going in the peat, but with a clough at the top where she once sat for an hour in drizzle and came away with the only poem of hers she will read aloud without apology.

Take a flask. Take a pencil. Go slowly, and stop when something moves.