Bill worked with Year 5 children from Hadrian Primary School, South Shields and Carville Primary School, Wallsend. He thinks of poetry as a means of looking afresh at the world around us, and had been looking for a way of using the Roman forts to help the children examine their sense of place and history. It occurred to him on his research visits that these children's experiences of the forts being reconstructed had some parallels with those of the people living here at the time of the Romans' first settlements. Bill encouraged them to look at the physical evidence on site both as moderns and as ancients, and this enabled them to gain a new perspective on the contemporary world surrounding Arbeia and Segedunum.

This relates to his own creative work, which tends to focus closely on landscape and history, re-inhabiting and reinterpreting old verse structures or belief systems in search of personal and contemporary resonances. As a Scot now living in England, the notion of the wall as a created or arbitrary border is very engaging, and he has written a sequence called Over the Wall about limitation and exile using specific locations as key points or modern fanes.

Bill was master poet for the sea to sea: renga along Hadrian's wall at Arbeia in September 2003

Photo Credit: Stephanie R Mickler

Over the Wall