I WRITE this in Nashville, towards the end of an American lecture tour, but my thoughts are already straining and yearning towards England, not least because I am, at the time of writing, preparing for a singular event at the Temple Church, one of the most beautiful and numinous places in London.

In Nashville, anything more than 50 years old is considered historic, not least because of the American habit of pulling down perfectly good old buildings and building new ones every time there is a change in architectural fashion or a development in technology.

So, part of my yearning for England is a yearning for visible continuity, for rootedness in history, for a sense that a building itself has been the long patient witness of the centuries through which it has stood, the layers of time, the leaf-fall of history, thickening and deepening around and within it.

From that point of view, the Temple Church is outstanding, with a history going back to 1185. Since then, the church itself has witnessed and absorbed so much. It was there that the negotiations with King John took place which led to the signing of Magna Carta. It was there in the church and its gardens that Shakespeare set the imaginary scene of the plucking of the two roses of York and Lancaster, and the start of the War of the Roses; and, most famously, as its name suggests, the Temple Church witnessed the rise and spectacular fall of the order of the Knights Templar.

The association of this church with both the ideals and the corruption of medieval knighthood is partly why I decided to hold my event — “Merlin’s Isle: A Journey in Words and Music”, a concert and reading — there. I am launching of my ballad-cycle Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad, of which the first volume is published next month.

By the time the Temple Church was built, Arthur-mania was already sweeping England — and, indeed, much of Europe, inspired by the composition, about 50 years earlier, in 1136, of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), which introduces us to the story of Arthur, and especially to the wizard Merlin.

Since then, the tale of Arthur has been taken up and retold, renewed and developed, by English poets and prose writers from Malory to Tennyson, and on to David Jones, Charles Williams, T. H. White, and beyond. The telling of the tale has often itself been interwoven with signal events in British history; indeed, for our evening in the Temple Church, we arranged for the St Martin’s Voices to sing from Purcell’s setting of an Arthurian libretto that the poet John Dryden originally composed in 1684 to celebrate the following year’s 25th anniversary of the Restoration.

I have loved the tales of Arthur, “the matter of Britain”, as the medieval poets called it, since I was a child; and, as a student of literature, I have been fascinated by how it has grown and developed, and how each generation has found different insights in it. So, now, I have dared to take up the tale myself, in the hope of being a small part of it, making a small contribution to that long tradition. As I say in the epilogue that ends my first volume:

And so the tale came down the years
In every land and tongue.
And old folk told it through their tears
And gave it to the young.

And even I, in these dark days,
Have heard and found it true.
So I have taken up the tale
And passed it on to you.