This setting was written in 2000 for the choir of St Michael’s Church, Bramhall, Cheshire, and was first performed by them on Advent Sunday that year. I am grateful to the choir’s then Director, John Beilby, for asking me to write it; and to its current Director, Maragaret Scott, for subsequent sympathetic and moving performances. It appears here in revised form (the original is still available on CPDL). Various performances here and in the United States have made me look at the piece again (2014) and I have made several changes. It shares its main melody with my Shropshire Pastorale for oboe/oboe d’amore and strings, and my setting of the A.E.Housman poem for tenor and piano which first saw the birth of the melody.