Ivor Gurney, born in Gloucester in 1890, was both a poet and a composer. He served in the First World War, was gassed, and spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals. His poems repeatedly return to the fields, hills, and rivers of his home county, and “That County” is one of the clearest expressions of that loyalty. Written with a soldier-poet’s directness and a composer’s ear, it argues that the landscape we truly know can matter more than grander scenery.
The sonnet begins by giving other people permission to seek their own emotional landmarks. Gurney names Helvellyn in the Lake District and “black Plinlimmon” in Wales, along with “any English heights of bravery.” These places may hold “the central fires of secret memory” for other walkers. But after the volta, the speaker makes a different choice: “I will go climb my little hills to see / Severn, and Malverns, May Hill’s tiny grove.” The central idea is rooted in that contrast. Significance is not measured in altitude or drama. A local rise can offer “all quiet heart’s delight” because it is layered with personal memory, familiarity, and shared history.
Gurney shapes this argument through the poem’s construction. It is a fourteen-line sonnet with an iambic pulse, but its rhymes are flexible and sometimes slanting—“love,” “above,” “prove,” “grove”—as though the verse itself refuses to strain for spectacular effect. The opening “Go up, go up” creates a sense of ascent and invitation, its repeated stresses hitting like two footsteps on a climb. The list of famous peaks then moves quickly across Britain before the tone drops into plain, definite speech: “No Everest is here, no peaks of power / Astonish men.” That simplicity is deliberate. The poem does not want to astonish; it wants to return home. Enjambment lets thought spill over line-ends, as when “wherever lie” flows into “The central fires of secret memory,” suggesting that memory itself overflows neat boundaries.
The imagery is precise and deeply tactile. The “winding ways” are “white in the frost-time, blinding in full June blaze,” a sharp sensory shift from winter’s pale lanes to summer’s glare. Those roads lead not to wilderness but to “village and quarry, taverns and many a tower / That saw Armada beacons set alight.” The beacons of 1588, lit across England to warn of the Spanish Armada, turn a Gloucestershire hilltop into a link with national memory. Key words such as “little hills,” “secret memory,” and “quiet heart’s delight” reinforce the idea that the private and the ordinary can hold lasting emotional power. The “central fires” are hidden but real, burning beneath everyday places.
What makes “That County” significant is its quiet resistance to the Romantic cult of the sublime. Gurney does not need an Everest or a Helvellyn to feel awe; he needs a view of the Severn, the Malverns, and May Hill. This is not small-minded nostalgia but a recovery of belonging—especially moving from a poet whose war trauma and institutionalisation had removed him from home. The final beacon image carries that meaning further: even a modest hill can send a signal across centuries. For student readers, the poem offers a humane lesson. The places that shape us are often the ones we might overlook, where memory and affection have been gently, persistently burning.