Roz Brady

Folksinger, Poet & Songwriter

Welcome!

This site includes my music, new nature writing. Latest blog for Dartmoor Preservation Association, and...

we are 5th row down 5th along

My new album out now...

Our new album Love Songs was released to a fabulous capacity audience at Exeter Folk Club late last year and now the great reviews are rolling in.

'Love Songs' Dartmoor forests, ancient meadows, spring mornings, autumn, curlews, nightingales and skylarks, love songs for the hope that by working together the beautiful dreamland of the British countryside will be restored. An album of self-written and traditional love songs from the British folk cannon.

This is going on my 'Favourites for the year... A great, great voice from Roz. Si's guitar accompaniments are just spell-binding. Fabulous album! Get it on your Christmas list! 'Love Songs is amongst my top picks of the year'. 'Tim Walker's Folk' on BBC Radio Lincolnshire

'A really beautiful album. CD of sunlight and birdsong.'
Genevieve Tudor on Genevieve Plays Folk podcast

It's a joyful day - blue skies in December! - when favourite musicians produce a new album. In BarronBrady's 'love songs', Roz Brady is in marvellous voice, with Si Barron's guitar in delicate duet. Spell-binding!

The choice of songs on BarronBrady's new album is superb. Their own haunting songs, with 'the Last Wolf' howling at Devon lorries...& ecstatic traditional 'love songs', sung with lightness and grace. In 'Jock o' Hazeldean', Walter Scott provides a thrillingly happy ending! No one lies dead in a cold hall.

'She's o'er the Border and awa....'
Alison Brackenbury

For more info on 'Love Songs' and where to get it go to shop

And...

My latest published work, 'Next To Me, A Robin'

Prose, poetry and illustrations, written in and about the landscape and wildlife of Dartington Hall Estate, South Devon.

Next To Me A Robin

Now available on

Amazon

"There, hidden in that round wood and by the river and hedgerows that mark the borders of wild nature, her birds, plants and small mammals, and that carry the eye over the landscape and beyond, is where I explored and rambled, meditated, sometimes slept and dreamed."

This poem was written in Chacegrove, an island wood surrounded by arable land in the centre of the Estate. Ideal to lose yourself in.

I had permission from the warden to write there.

Chacegrove Fox

May 2005

If I rest where the fox curls

the den wall reddened around me

with the warm blooded family

white tips of tail and snout

to find me -

I become bendy, soft and wavy,

to smell of earth, safe and deep

dust in fur

in hope,

sound of the wind enduring me,

rain in the leaves,

droplets,

I would be at home

in a sea of ramsons,

standing on my red parapet,

lit by the noon-day sun

with a wren and an unknown song

that rise up like nettles.

If I write this much

the blue tit quenches

and the memory of leaping windrows

beneath the pulse of a skylark,

and my whole world shining,

I will have come home.

I fold myself under dog’s mercury

and sleep among roots.

Figurative artist Simon agreed to do the Dartington landscapes as long as they contained a human figure. Embarrasingly that was me!

I was on friendly terms with the Dartington Estate warden Bram Bartlett who had been working there since 1971. Bram would saunter around the estate with a shot gun over his arm to deal with the grey squirrel infestation in the woods in between dealing with his numerous other responsibilities. Not least was the writing of a regular nature diary called 'Bram's Patch' for the estate newspaper. After gaining permission from Bram's widow Mary Bartlett I decided to weave excerpts from 'Bram's Patch' through Next To Me, A Robin.

I wrote the poems at Dartington for Next To Me A Robin in the lay-by of my singing and songwriting career with folk duo Barron Brady. You get a sense of this to and fro aspect of my life from the wide world of cities, roads and venues back to the small intimate rural world of my life as a writer in the woods in this next poem. Back in the Bay of the Field was written on a return to Dartington in the springtime.

Back In The Bay Of The Field

In the bay of the field,

Where the blackbird rustles, her jars of black seeds

And flutes up and sees me and scarpers piping, to the tig-tig of the wren

The badger is here again under the dark surf—

snout in

Where mushrooms glow fresh from the forge, and the

great puffball bird has laid her egg

Under a little wavelet, that holds a note of green.

While the badger sings up the worms, and hears pinks

wriggling

She delves her dark, snout pools, small, white, shelly

things—

Crushed, in her iron snout

Charming the slug and the snail,

Chewing with her tiny, chalky teeth,

Tugging at mushroom roots,

Smelling the wind.

And blindly she passes her days

Paddling in the hushed fields,

Crunching on invisible things—

I return from

Dark passageways, from caverns, clubs and byways

from long sleep and the impossible fragrance

Of elder roots, and new moons, and old rooms,

our blood the same colour,

Our hearts the noise the wind curls round

the hazel bush and the ring of a swallow

Beating the bounds of her airy world, perfecting her

circles on the warren wind.

The tracery of a cow parsnip

Carries the same heart as us

A joke of hogweed,

Laughing under the poplars

And under the lieze of a dark hedge—

The smell of velvet purple foxglove on my nose

And the corky-fruited water dropwort mists over the

river

Where the otter curls and the deep-dawn steams—

Under a boiling sun,

I have come again to the sea fields, and the sea—

badger.

*corky-fruited water dropwort: a solid stemmed Umbellifer that grows along streams and riverbanks

So whenever I was back off tour I would run out to the woods and fields of Dartington and write outdoors in all weathers rain or shine. In the woods poems poured out even as I was singing, doing voice-work and writing songs in preparation for the next tour. It was a prolific time for me creatively. When I got home from my walks to our house in Dartington village I would threw the poems into a box under the dining room table. When I told Kay Dunbar this she said ‘Come on, you have gather them into book.’

Subsequently while on tour in the North of England Si and I took a break and hired out a cottage near Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast. It was there that I compiled all the poems from the box into a book and Next To Me A Robin was born.

After the launch of 'Next To Me a Robin' in the Great Hall Dartington I received letters from readers all over the country. This is my favourite review:

'Thank you for your beautiful book. I've read it cover to cover and so has my Mum. I couldn't put it down.'
Becky Mills Yorkshire

I now write and compose outside on Dartmoor everyday only working on the computer at the end of the writing process.

'Next To Me, A Robin'

Writings from the Woods and Fields of Dartington Hall Estate, South Devon 2006-2009

Published by Barrow Court Press £9.00 available Amazon

A beautiful,richly illustrated book of nature poetry and prose for adults and children.

Exquisite original pen and ink drawings by Simon Barron they are reminiscent of drawings by Earnest Shepherd in the famous books by A.A.Milne.

Other Publications

Essay in, ' Village - Women's History and Survival in an English Village 1841-1971' by Alison Brackenbury Pub. 2025

Essay: ‘Into the Woods’ in the anthology: ‘Landscape Into Literature’ published by Green Books which also features essays by Hunter Davies, Brian Pattern, Richard Mabey and Penelope Lively.

Paperback and Hardback Editions

Next To Me, a Robin is available as kindle, paperback and hardback illustrated editions. The hardback editions were bound by nationally acclaimed binder Mary Bartlett at Dartington Bookbinding Workshop.

Greetings Cards

Greetings cards featuring Si's pen and ink and colour illustrations of Dartington Estate are available.

The Jackdoor on the Chimney Pot

My next book was written in the countryside around a North Somerset village

'The Jackdoor on the Chimney Pot' was penned in the woods and fields of Barrow Gurney the small village in Somerset where we moved in 2009.

'The Jackdoor in the Chimney Pot' will be out soon!

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