Seize the Day: High Hills Lament

Seize the Day are a vibrant, melodic, harmonious, original, uncompromising, and tough  folk band from Somerset. I believe some of their songs will enter the canon of English folk, and that future fold historians will shake their heads at the massive way they were underestimated by the Musick Industry. This is one of their slower songs, but I put it here because I am learning the words to sing to myself on solitary walks on Mendip.


You can hear it by clicking here. (Can't get the video to upload)

High Hills Lament


I dreamed I was going where tall trees are growing

Where nine rivers flowing roll down to the sea,

When I woke to hear crying lamenting and sighing,

Men in yellow arriving to fell the last tree.




High hills of our fathers, round hills of our mothers,

Green hills of my people that used to be free,

Scraped away to make room for some global consumer,

Whose growth like a tumour eats England and me.




I'm a lover of England, her wildlife and wisdom,

I have walked the land o'er and I've seen what's been done,

On those roads I have followed, through a land that's been swallowed,

Land tortured and hollowed for three pounds a ton.




And I'll hear no excuses for those whose abuses

Have put to such uses the land of their birth,

Till there's nothing grows off it but slag-heaps of profit

For some high-flyer not fit to live on this Earth.




Let their slaves justify it, they cannot deny it

- Though nightly they try it, and seem to succeed -

That our world has been wasted, skinned, skewered and basted

For a dream which, once tasted, consumed us with greed.




Are my people half dead then from a lie that's been fed them,

- Those bribes which have bled them of courage and power?

While our last open spaces, all those sweet special places,

Are forgotten like faces that used to be ours.




And I dreamed I was going where tall trees are growing,

Where nine rivers flowing roll down to the sea.

Tis the Isle of the Blessed there, but I'll never rest there,

Till there's no life oppressed there and my land is free!