Layered Landscapes: A Poetry Challenge with the National Trust
On Young Poets Network, we’ve challenged you to write poems that reach into the past or imagine the future before – but what about the pasts and futures we share with nature? We’re teaming up with the National Trust to ask you to write poems about entanglement of people and landscape, throughout history and beyond…
This challenge is for writers aged 5 to 25 based anywhere in the world. The deadline is 23:59 GMT, Sunday 21 December 2025. Enter via Submittable.
As part of this challenge, we’re running a free writing workshop for young poets aged 14-25 on Saturday 8 November. Book your free space.
The challenge: write a poem about our shared history and future with the landscapes we inhabit.
The National Trust is Europe’s largest conservation charity. They look after nature, beauty and history for everyone to enjoy, and they do it with the help of millions of members, volunteers, staff and donors. Without this, they couldn’t care for the miles of coastline, woodlands, countryside and the hundreds of historic buildings, gardens and precious collections we protect.
Shannon Hogan from the National Trust says, ‘It is so important for us to amplify and understand young people’s voices and relationships to their own landscapes and environments, to help us shape the future of our own organisation and principles. We hope this challenge provides the creative opportunity for young people to express their own connections to history and nature, which in turn will help us learn more about the role we can play in supporting and fostering that connection now and for future generations.’
Prompt 1: Imaginary excavations
Landscapes across the UK – and the rest of the world! – have changed hugely across thousands of years. Sometimes these shifts : new buildings, rising sea levels, vanishing woodlands. Often, the two are intertwined: humans might disrupt a local ecosystem when settling somewhere new or after inventing a new technology, and natural events drive migration patterns and lifestyle changes.
It can be hard to look past the present when looking at a landscape on the surface. Enter the archaeologist!
You might have come across archaeologists in the context of studying ancient civilisations, like the Romans or the Egyptians. Their job is to examine ancient sites and objects to learn more about the past—sometimes, this means excavating landscapes, i.e. digging to find these objects. The National Trust looks after more than 90,000 archaeological sites, spanning hundreds of thousands of years of human history.
While we may not be able to literally dig through the land around us to find out more about its past, through poetry, we can excavate our local landscapes imaginatively. In doing so, we can think about the humans (and non-humans!) who inhabited them, and what their relationship with the land has been like.
Plenty of poets have used digging and excavation as a metaphor for uncovering and understanding the past – Seamus Heaney, Peter Gizzi, Lukas Bacho…
Your turn: write a poem imagining what you might find beneath the ground in a place you know well – what might you find just below the surface in your local park, for example? What would you find if you dug a few feet deeper, and what kinds of questions could you ask those objects about life hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago?
For older YPNers (click to open)
Or you could perform your imaginary excavation above the ground, sketching out who might have inhabited a place familiar to you at different times in the past.
In Kayo Chingonyi’s poem ‘Andrew’s Corner,’ the speaker describes a local street at three different moments in time (warning: this poem contains imagery which some YPNers may find upsetting). The scenes are linked to one another through Chingonyi’s use of rhyme and sound patterning:
Where an old man comes, to practise
standing still, tutting
that the street he fought to keep is gone
and, sixty years on, he doesn’t belong
to this world of bass, blasting out of
passing cars, and earshot, at the speed
of an age when pubs close down
overnight; are mounds of rubble in a week.
Your turn: choose a local place that you know well. It could be as large as building, like a school, or as small as a specific tree or street corner. Write a poem capturing it at various moments in the past, present, and future. You could borrow Chingonyi’s structure of three stanzas starting ‘where…’.
You could use online resources like Google Maps, the Ordnance Survey, and local news articles. You could even interview other people who know the specific place well. How does this place change when the seasons change? Are there particular natural features that have disappeared or appeared over time? What did this place look like before you were born, and what might it look like a hundred years from now?
Prompt 2: Mapping out the past, present, and future
Although it’s tempting to imagine maps as objective sources of information, looking back through historical maps can tell us lots about the relationships between different groups of people, and indeed between these people and the natural world around them. The National Trust’s Land Map, for example, illustrates how the variety of places the Trust looks after has expanded since 1895.
If you’ve ever tried to sketch out a map, you’ll know that trying to condense the complexity of a landscape into a flat drawing is no easy task! You might find yourself unsure as to what to emphasise or leave out, or how to convey the scale or importance of a particular place. In some ways, this can feel similar to the experience of trying to translate a real-life experience or emotion into a piece of writing.
In 1966, Japanese artist Chieko Shiomi created Spatial Poem No. 2, a fluxatlas which plots poetic responses from other artists alongside drawn out borders and motifs from ancient maps, including compasses and windheads. You can find out more about maps and visual poetry here.
Simon Armitage’s collection Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems also plays with the relationship between poems and maps. All of the poems in the book are about his hometown of Marsden in West Yorkshire, and the book contains maps which illustrate where each poem is situated. You can watch Armitage reading from the collection at various locations in Marsden here.
Your turn: write a poem that maps out an area you know well, highlighting the relationship between land and people throughout time.
You could create a visual poem, like Chieko Shiomi, where you literally draw out a map. Or you could poetically map out your area by walking your reader through it, like Hannah Lowe does in ‘Early Morning Swim,’ where the speaker links her memories at a club in Brixton to its current state:
I pass by The Havana Social
where a decade ago I danced all night
under wooden beams […]Now ply-board seals the door and windows,
the name peeled to flecks of white.
Or you could take Simon Armitage’s approach, and create a map that accompanies a poem (or poems!) about a particular place. If you’re in the UK, check out the National Trust’s map of places. You might be surprised by how many of them there are…
Free poetry workshop
To help inspire your entries to this challenge, we’re running a free online poetry workshop for 14-25s on Saturday 8 November. Find out more and book your space here.
Prizes
Winners will be published on Young Poets Network and sent prizes such as poetry ebooks, posters and National Trust goodies.
How to enter
This challenge is for writers aged up to 25 based anywhere in the world. The deadline is 23:59 GMT, Sunday 21 December 2025.
You can send a poem, or poems, written down, or as video or audio files. If you are sending a written version of your poem, please type it into the body of your email. If you are sending a video or audio file, please attach it to the email (making sure it’s no bigger than 4MB or it won’t come through) or send us a link to where we can see/hear it. If you are submitting video or audio files, please also submit a text version. You can submit as many poems as you like.
We are using Submittable to accept submissions to this challenge. Please use this link to submit your poems. You will need to make a free Submittable account to submit in this way. Using Submittable helps our team to administrate and process entries more quickly.
Please use Submittable if you can. But if you have any problems entering via Submittable, don’t worry! You can still enter by email. Follow the instructions below.
Send your poem(s) to [email protected] with your name, date of birth/age, gender, the county (or, if you’re not from the UK, the country) you live in, and where you found out about this challenge (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, YPN email, etc). In the email subject line please write ‘Layered Landscapes challenge’. If you are aged 12 or younger on 21 December 2025, you will need to ask a parent/guardian to complete this permission form. Otherwise, we unfortunately cannot consider your entry due to data protection laws.
We welcome entries from schools and youth groups. Use this class entry form to enter students from your class or group and submit their poems via email to [email protected] in a single attachment if possible.
If you would like us to add you to the Young Poets Network mailing list, include ‘add me to the mailing list’ in the subject line of the email. If you would like us to confirm that we’ve received your entry, include ‘confirm receipt’ in the subject line. You may refuse to provide information about yourself.
Please be aware that Young Poets Network is for young people from any age up to 25, so we are unlikely to publish works on this website that contain graphic or upsetting imagery that is inappropriate for our younger members. If you are not sure whether your poem contains such content, you are of course welcome to submit it anyway for us to read. If your poem is chosen as a winner, we reserve the right to suggest some edits and/or include content warnings and/or not to publish explicit content. Remember, you are welcome to submit as many poems as you like for free.
By entering, you give permission for Young Poets Network and The Poetry Society and their partners to reproduce your poem in print and online in perpetuity if you are among the winning poets of this challenge, though copyright remains with you. Please do be sure to check through the general Terms and Conditions for YPN challenges as well.
If you require this information in an alternative format (such as Easy Read, Braille, Large Print or screenreader friendly formats), or need any assistance with your entry, please contact us at [email protected].