“The Roads,” taken from Spirits of Bondage, A Cycle of Lyrics, written by C. S. Lewis under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. The book was published by Heinneman in 1919, when Lewis was just twenty-one years of age, and reveals his early giftedness as a poet.

These verses show C. S. Lewis’s deep and, as it turned out, lifelong love for County Down. He once described his idea of Heaven to his friend David Bleakley as “Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of the County Down”!