AQA A-Level English Literature A Paper 2: Texts in shared contexts (2B), June 2025: Question 3

25 marks · Hard difficulty · Extended Response

Examine the significance of Sheers' representation of Wales in Skirrid Hill, writing about at least two poems.

Practise this question

Question

Question 03: Examine the significance of Sheers’ representation of Wales in Skirrid Hill. You must write about at least two poems in your answer. Total 25 marks.
Question text

03 Examine the significance of Sheers’ representation of Wales in Skirrid Hill.

You must write about at least two poems in your answer.

[25 marks]

Mark scheme

Show the mark scheme Mark scheme for Question 03 on Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers. Details indicative content across AO1 to AO5, including interpretations of Welsh nationhood, landscape, and culture; comparisons across poems; contextual influences; poetic form, structure, and language; and quality of argument.

Question 03

Skirrid Hill – Owen Sheers

Examine the significance of Sheers’ representation of Wales in Skirrid Hill.

You must write about at least two poems in your answer.

[25 marks]

Possible content:

Please refer to pages 4 to 7.

AO5 Explore literary texts informed by different interpretations

Students might consider:

• poems that offer a positive view of aspects of Welsh nationhood, landscape, culture and/or

traditions such as ‘Y Gaer’, ‘The Hill Fort’, ‘Border Country’, ‘Skirrid Hill’ and ‘Skirrid Fawr’

• poems that may be seen to offer an ambivalent view of aspects of Welsh nationhood, landscape,

culture and/or traditions, and indeed reflect possible difficulties, changes and challenges, such as

‘Flag’, ‘Joseph Jones’, ‘The Steelworks’, and ‘Farrier’

• representations of Wales past and present; issues relating to Sheers’ own overseas birth (in Fiji)

and sense of Welshness and personal identity

• the extent to which representations of Wales and Welsh nationhood, landscape, culture and/or

traditions may be connected to the major themes and ideas presented across the collection as a

whole

• etc.

AO4 Explore connections across literary texts

Focus might be on:

• poetic representations of a specific nation, location, landscape and/or its culture and traditions in

modern literature

• etc.

AO3 Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which

literary texts are written and received

Focus might be on:

• how attitudes to Wales and its nationhood, landscape, culture and/or traditions are expressed

within this poetry collection and how this reflects changing attitudes over time

• ideas about Wales and its nationhood, landscape, culture and/or traditions as expressed within this

poetry collection, and how this reflects changing attitudes over time

• the ways in which poetic methods are integral to the collection’s presentation of Wales, its

nationhood, landscape, culture and/or traditions

• etc.

AO2 Analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts

Focus might be on:

•16 aspects of poetic form and genre

• aspects of structure, eg use of stanzas, and also the collection’s overall organisational structure

and coherence, and the links and connections that may be made between individual poems

• aspects of language, eg rhyme, rhythm, imagery

• methods that might affect the ways in which Wales, its nationhood, landscape, culture and/or

traditions are presented within the collection

• etc.

AO1 Articulate informed, personal and creative responses to literary texts, using associated

concepts and terminology, and coherent, accurate written expression

• quality of argument

• organisation of ideas

• use of appropriate concepts and terminology

• technical accuracy.

Accept any valid interpretations, any valid comments on contexts and any valid discussion of

authorial methods.

How to answer it

Owen Sheers: Representation of Wales in Skirrid Hill

AQA A-Level English Literature A • Paper 2 Section B • 25 Marks

What this question tests

This essay question evaluates your ability to construct an integrated, evaluative literary argument examining how Owen Sheers constructs cultural identity, geography, and heritage across Skirrid Hill.

  • AO1 (Argument & Expression): Coherent thesis, academic register, sophisticated literary terms, clear trajectory across at least two poems.
  • AO2 (Poetic Methods): Close textual analysis of form, meter, stanzaic architecture, sonic devices, and imagery.
  • AO3 (Contexts): Post-industrial Wales, devolution, shifting masculinity, linguistic heritage (Welsh / Cymraeg), and the tension between belonging and exile.
  • AO4 (Literary Connections): Locating the text within regional, elegiac, and modern national identity writing traditions.
  • AO5 (Debate & Interpretation): Evaluating the dual significance of Wales—whether represented as an idyllic ancestral refuge, an emotionally ruptured borderland, or a dying post-industrial culture.

Question 03: Deconstructing the Prompt

"Examine the significance of Sheers’ representation of Wales in Skirrid Hill. You must write about at least two poems in your answer."

💡 The Key Term: "Significance"

Examiners use "significance" to trigger two things:

  • Significance of meaning: What does Wales stand for? (A source of spiritual grounding, mourning, fractured masculinity, or cultural rupture).
  • Significance of method: How do form and language deliver this meaning? (Etymology, couplets, enjambment, topography as metaphor).

🧠 Selecting the Optimal Pairing

Choosing contrasting poems ensures a nuanced argument (AO5):

  • Option A (Nature & Fracture): Skirrid Fawr + Border Country (mythic landscape vs. industrial decline and lost innocence).
  • Option B (Identity & Post-Industrial Wales): Flag + The Steelworks (cultural inertia/commercialisation vs. obsolete labour).
  • Option C (Pastoral Heritage & Grief): Y Gaer + The Hill Fort (landscape as emotional anchor and container of sorrow).

Comparative Deep-Dive: Flag & Border Country

A Band 5 / Band 6 Model Pathway

✅ Thesis & Argument Trajectory

Thesis: Sheers depicts Wales not as a static pastoral sanctuary, but as a site of liminality and grief. Wales is marked by post-industrial abandonment and superficial nationalism, yet remains an indelible spiritual anchor that shapes personal identity.

  • Layer 1: Wales as wounded and commodified in modern life ( Flag ).
  • Layer 2: Wales as a graveyard of heavy industry and lost boyhood ( Border Country ).
  • Layer 3: The physical soil and language ( Cymru ) as an enduring, restorative pulse beneath the decline.

📐 Step-by-Step Analytical Structure

  1. Step 1 (Conceptual Opening): Define the duality in Sheers' Wales—the Welsh name Ysgirid Fawr translates to "shattered mountain" (divorce/separation).
  2. Step 2 (Analysis of Poem 1 - Flag): Explore visceral imagery: the national emblem is a "severed head" or "hung bandage" . The dragon's vitality is bled dry by tourist commodification and rugby tribalism.
  3. Step 3 (Analysis of Poem 2 - Border Country): Track the transition from pastoral play to the metallurgical detritus of the car graveyard; the landscape mirrors the suicide of a friend and the death of traditional industry.
  4. Step 4 (Linguistic & Form Comparison): Compare the stuttering, halting rhythms of tercets in Border Country with the cynical modern register of Flag.
  5. Step 5 (Synthesis/AO5): Re-evaluate: is Sheers lamenting a fatal decline, or using poetry as an act of cultural reclamation?
Examiner Insight: Top-band responses avoid treating the poems as separate silos. They weave conceptual links across both texts within each thematic paragraph, evaluating authorial choices rather than narrating the subject matter.

Poetic Methods & Textual Evidence (AO2 & AO3)

💡 Evidence Bank 1: Flag

  • "hung bandage" / "swan's neck" : Similes strip the Red Dragon of fierce mythic potency, reducing it to trauma, fragility, and inertia.
  • "A delivery van's behind" : Everyday banality juxtaposed against mythic heritage; patriotism reduced to commercial branding.
  • "Grew from the field's dark headstone" : AO3 link to devitalised culture; questions whether Welsh identity can resurrect itself or remains buried in its past.

💡 Evidence Bank 2: Border Country

  • "Life spent smoking along the contours of stone hills" : Industrial slag and natural geological stone conflated; heavy industry carved into the geography.
  • "Elegy of a quarry" / "rust-scabbed car" : Tactile decay symbolises both youth’s mortality and the 1980s collapse of coal and steel economies under Thatcherism.
  • "The field that threw him" : The land itself exerts lethal force, embodying the psychological weight of remaining behind while others leave.

Examiner Advice: How to Secure Level 5 & Level 6

❌ Common Errors (Where Marks are Dropped)

  • Travelogue Readings: Describing Wales as pretty scenery rather than interrogating political, industrial, and elegiac themes.
  • Ignoring Form: Quoting lines without analysing stanza structures (tercets, couplets), line breaks, enjambment, and rhythm.
  • Biographical Determinism: Reducing the collection solely to "Sheers was born in Fiji and moved to Wales," neglecting how the poems universally explore displacement.
  • Asymmetrical Balance: Writing 80% on one poem and tossing in two lines about a second poem at the very end. Both poems need robust analysis.

🧠 Level 6 Differentiators (Band 6 Qualities)

  • Title Synthesis: Linking Wales directly to the collection's title—Y Sgidi Fawr (the split mountain)—showing that physical separation mirrors psychological and cultural fractures.
  • Etymological Precision: Unpacking the interplay between the Welsh language and English idiom (e.g., naming traditions, topographical nouns).
  • Debating Devolution & Modernity: Recognising that Sheers questions what Welsh nationhood means in a 21st-century, globalised landscape.
  • Structural Awareness: Discussing where poems sit within the sequence of the collection and how paired poems (like Y Gaer / The Hill Fort) reflect alternating viewpoints.

Topics

Modern times: literature from 1945 to the present day · Skirrid Hill

Question and mark scheme from the AQA A-Level English Literature A examination, Paper 2: Texts in shared contexts (2B), June 2025. QuestionVault is an independent revision resource; questions remain the copyright of the awarding body.