The Falls of Borrowdale

A Poem by David Lewis Paget

The sky was a smudge-coloured blue up there

When the sailing ship came in,

With full top gallants and spinnaker flared

Full flight from a world of sin,

The mermaid carved on her prow was proud

As she breasted the salt-licked spray,

Her hair a-stream, as the waves she ploughed

And surged to Ascension Bay.

I’d watched her approach from the Sailor’s Rest

That lay way up on the cliff,

‘It isn’t a question of when,’ he’d said,

‘Nor even a question of if!

The ghost of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’

Comes in with a clear blue sky,

It happens but once a year,’ he’d said

‘On the twenty-fifth of July!’

I’d laughed at him in the ‘Admiral’s Arms’

As he swallowed his seventh ale,

While others listened with frightened eyes

Each face was a shade of pale,

‘You’ll see it best from the Sailor’s Rest,

That ruin, up on the cliff,

But don’t get caught by the devil’s cohort

Swarming up from the ship.’

They’d scaled the cliff to the Sailor’s Rest,

I knew the story of old,

Had slain the crew of the ‘Captain Teck’,

Or so it was always told,

They’d left the ‘Rest’ in a sea of flames

For the sake of an ancient feud,

While ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’ lay wrecked

By the mutineers that crewed.

They’d seized young Molly, the serving girl

Who’d worked at the Sailor’s Rest,

Had pulled her hair and had pinned her down,

Exposed the girl at the breast,

They took their pleasure and dragged her out

To the edge of the cliff, and pale,

Then flung her screaming down to the deck

Of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’.

And so it was that I lay with the glass

So firmly fixed to my eye,

Up on the cliff by the Sailor’s Rest

On the twenty-fifth of July,

The ghostly ship flew into the shore

Under a mass of sail,

No sign of the crew, no lookout stood

On watch at the forward rail.

The ship ground up on the Daley Rocks

Rose shrieking, up in the air,

Her timbers creaking and groaning with

The mermaid’s look of despair,

The crew poured out of the lower decks

And flung themselves overboard,

These phantoms, straight from the devil’s lair

To put good men to the sword.

I ran some way from the Sailor’s Rest

Lay under a bush, and hid,

I didn’t know what to do for the best

But watched, to see what they did,

They swarmed all over the Sailor’s Rest

Put everyone to the sword,

Then dragged poor Molly out on the grass

And I cried, ‘Please stop them, Lord!’

Then the phantoms stopped as they heard my cry

And they turned, each black as sin,

Molly let out a quivering sigh

And they burst in flames, within,

She stood alone at the edge of the cliff

And she waved, no longer pale,

While the mermaid smiled on the prow of the ship,

‘The Falls of Borrowdale.’

David Lewis Paget

© 2013 David Lewis Paget

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Linda Marie Van Tassell

Your words always transport me into another time and place, a ghostly realm where some horror has been perpetrated upon mankind, for which a penance must be paid, often in the form of living that horror over and over again. It's nice to see Molly set free from this hell in the end, and the vision of the mermaid smiling is hauntingly beautiful.

You are a master!