First Known When Lost: "Houses Will Build Themselves And Tombstones Rewrite Names On Dead Men's Graves"

First Known When Lost: "Houses Will Build Themselves And Tombstones Rewrite Names On Dead Men's Graves"
Excerpt:
Perhaps this shifting sands business is not a one-way street...
The following poem by Andrew Young (1885-1971) is about a sandy place in the north of Scotland.

Culbin Sands

Here lay a fair fat land;
But now its townships, kirks, graveyards
Beneath bald hills of sand
Lie buried deep as Babylonian shards.

But gales may blow again;
And like a sand-glass turned about
The hills in a dry rain
Will flow away and the old land look out;

And where now hedgehog delves
And conies hollow their long caves
Houses will build themselves
And tombstones rewrite names on dead men's graves.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1960).

The fate of the townships, kirks, and graveyards was, according to the Forestry Commission of Scotland, sealed by the great storm of 1694. In later years, a forest was planted to arrest the sands. Much of the forest was felled during the First World War to provide framing and duckboards for the trenches. The trees have now grown back. So, who knows what might happen? ...