COLIN Speakman is famous as the progenitor of the Dales Way: ‘I walk, therefore I am’ he wrote.

A prolific author, mostly on the Yorkshire Dales and Wolds, he has also written a scholarly biography of the famous Yorkshire geologist John Phillips. Speakman is a pillar of the Wharfedale poets and the creator of haunting poems which are redolent of his native Yorkshire.

The latest collection of his poetry, The Lost Chronicles of York, is a wonderfully evocative collection of poems which almost reconcile the reader to the supposed loss of the mediaeval original during William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North.

A nostalgic palimpsest of Yorkshire culture, the poems piece together fragments from many sources. Starting with the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, they cover 1,500 years of the county’s history and legend. They range from Alcuin and Caedmon to the sad fate of Mary Jane, famously courted on Ilkley Moor; from Eric Bloodaxe and the independent Kingdom of Jorvik to the tragic train crash at Garsdale on Christmas Eve 1911; from St Wilfrid of Ripon to Job Senior, the Hermit of Rombalds Moor; from the Shepherd Lord to John Fowler the engineer; from Turner visualising Hannibal crossing the Alps during a snowstorm on Otley Chevin to the Otley bypass.

The industrial revolution features - the manufacture of steam engines in Hunslet and the abandoned Bleach Mill at Burley. Greenholme Mills at Burley connect not only with millowners W E Forster and William Fison but also with Matthew Arnold. Speakman finds links between Yorkshire places and other poets like Sir Herbert Read (Kirkdale) and William Watson (Burley-in-Wharfedale).

The poems are a great celebration of Yorkshire. They stick in your mind and, once read, you will find yourself declaiming them as you walk on the many paths charted by Colin Speakman.

The Lost Chronicles of York by Colin Speakman is available in the Grove Bookshop and online from Gritstone Publishing Cooperative (gritstonecoop.co.uk).