There was once a small abode called Cotter’s Inn,
Found up north and to the west.
It offered tea and ale and traveller’s respite, but oh how they lamented,
Its barmen were scruffy, the women underdressed!
No men of tailored coats ever quite understood,
How those who stumbled through its oaken door could call themselves blessed.

For years it sat amongst the rocky plains,
The home of decay and cinders and yarns.
Soldiers slumped upon the seats, seamen bickered over their rum,
And all the time, the stories snaked, through the henhouses and the barns.
Gossip most scandalous, a slip of the loosened tongue,
Became the foundations of the grey-stoned surrounding cairns.

Cotter’s Inn fed many a rumour, its barmen heard many a tale,
One for every hungry, weather-worn man who reclined in a wooden seat.
Rough voices muttered, the rusty doorbell tinkled,
And gone was a history, a chronicle of fate’s disfavour, in a thump of feet.
They came, they went, some stayed the night,
Until the hammers came down hard and the barmen brought the white sheet.

Alas, Cotter’s Inn, that dignity for the exiled,
That refuge for the lowly men of past riches, it stands no more!











Not in eyesight, not in speech, for whose tongue is to remember,









That once among these ruthless ridges stood a battered oaken door?
The stories of the mountain were spieled with drunken vivacity,
And taken by mouth and by scroll – too far across the moor.