Agatewards is an old northern word also used in Lincolnshire that means to walk a while with someone on the way home.

It felt quite appropriate for this compilation. Not only are we walking a little way with Tennyson and the characters in his Lincolnshire dialect poems, we’re spending a bit of time together travelling through the music that was inspired by them.

The voices you can hear in the tunes are Mr Edward Campion and Mrs Edith Burgess. Both were leading authorities on the Lincolnshire dialect in their time and they recorded some of Tennyson’s Lincolnshire dialect poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found some of these recordings at a record fair in Chesterfield a few years ago.. Of course, I bought them on the spot - and fell in love with them on listening.

Tennyson lived the first 28 years of his life in the heart of agricultural Lincolnshire, though he left the county in 1837. Of course, his time there left a deep impression on him, and while these poems were written in the latter part of the 19th Century, they are rich in language and observation - and humour. They are a wonderfully evocative time-capsule not only of the dialect, but of ordinary people’s lives. I’ve barely scratched the surface in the words I’ve used in these tunes.

I’ve had a lot of fun creating these little pieces while dipping into the history and dialect of my home county. There will certainly be more to come...

Graham Thorpe
March 2026

Track list:

1. Hello

2. Friday Flit

3. Day’s End

4. Childer

5. Three Knocks

6. As Then, So Now

7. Boglin

8. Done & Dusted

9. What’s Books?

10. And A Spinster I’ll Be

11. Knows Nowt

12. Owd Roa

Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Graham Thorpe
Physically published by Yellowbelly Records

Catalog No. YBRCD051 (Cassette and Minidisc coming soon!)