When I was a lad, I ran around the hills and fields of my native county,
now when I think about it, I feel sick, ’cos they were full of manure.

It has many beauty spots, does Lancashire.
Rivington Pike, guarding the Lancastrian Plain,
Stonyhurst College, that public school at Hurst Green,
which produced Sherlock Holmes-creator Conan Doyle,
and my favourite, the Bowland fells.

But none was more enchanting than a glade of Bluebells,
by the river Ribble, below the town of Clitheroe with its Norman castle,
where I, running along, would watch a cow piddle.

Its ancestors would have fled when Roman soldiers,
from their fort down the valley at Ribchester,
picnicked, for a glade in the shadow of Pendle
Hill wasn’t far for their chariots to go.

‘I wonder, did you eat the Lancashire hot pot,
the dish the county is famous for?’ I asked an Irishman
who’d worked his socks off, feeding this county’s economy.

‘Sure I did,’he grinned, ‘to blend in, I even stood up for the Queen.

‘Indeed, like most rural-born Irish, I quite liked the old dear,
but I secretly longed for my mother’s dish of cabbage and bacon.’

Then an old miner from Wigan, an industrial part of this beautiful county,
quipped, ‘We used to sing Irish songs, while working down in the coal shaft.

‘One went fiddly, diddly, middly, giddly, piddly, fiddly-do.
We sang it as we washed off the black dust from a dark cavern.’

‘I like to visit this enchanting place,
for it is rumoured the pagan tribe, The Ascelcions,
believed a grove of bluebells in the valley, to be magical,
and could cure me of the cough I got from digging for black fuel,
underneath the town of Wigan.’

Just then a ghostly Roman soldier appeared out of the grove,
lapping the water, courting a fair female Ascelcion.

We listened spellbound as he declared,
‘I’ve run away from the invaders, for Lancashire folk are so welcoming.
I swam the river and need a fire to warm me.

‘Sure thing,’ said the old miner, ‘here’s some coal I nicked from the colliery;
I was going to burn it, along with my memories.’

The Irishman threw in a cabbage, and we had a great feed
on the banks of the lovely Ribble.

A cow mooed so loudly I fell onto a patch of manure,
and couldn’t help but laugh, as, in the company of a sheep,
the big bovine, author of this fertilising act, drank thirstily,
and the sultry summer air was filled with steam from his piddle.