Lesson 4.2.2.7

4.2.2.7 Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers Quiz: AQA English Literature A, Unit 2

20 questions

Written by Revision Ninja · Last reviewed 11 October 2026

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Lesson 4.2.2.7, Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers: 20 multiple choice questions for the AQA English Literature A (7712), Unit 2: Texts in shared contexts, written with Revision Ninja.

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The 20 questions

  1. In what year was Owen Sheers's collection Skirrid Hill published?

    • 1985
    • 1962
    • 2005
    • 1939

  2. Where is the Skirrid hill located?

    • Cornwall, on the south-western peninsula, where the cliffs meet the Atlantic waves
    • Monmouthshire, Wales
    • Yorkshire, in the north of England, where the hills rise above the moors and dales
    • Northumberland, on the border with Scotland, where the castles stand above the river

  3. What is Owen Sheers's nationality?

    • Scottish
    • Cornish
    • Irish
    • Welsh

  4. Which broad theme does Skirrid Hill's landscape-based poetry most often explore?

    • Memory, place and inheritance
    • Naval trade routes
    • Ancient Roman roads
    • Stock market speculation

  5. What is the effect of the poem's connection with a specific landscape?

    • It makes the poem universal and placeless, drawing its meaning from ideas, not from geography
    • It roots the poem's emotion in a particular, concrete place
    • It erases all sense of place, so that the poem could be set anywhere at all in the world
    • It removes all personal feeling from the poem, leaving only a detached description of land

  6. Which term describes poetry rooted in a particular geographic setting?

    • Sonnet sequence
    • Dramatic monologue
    • Epic poetry
    • Place poetry

  7. Which theme of Skirrid Hill links to the war?

    • Renaissance courtly love, and the sonnets written to idealised ladies at princely courts
    • The legacy of conflict in family and community memory
    • The rise of stock markets, and the speculative trading that drove prices up and down
    • Ancient Roman conquest, and the legions that marched across the province in each campaign

  8. Which concept describes a community's shared memory of a loss?

    • Individual vanity
    • Collective memory
    • Commercial enterprise
    • Imperial prestige

  9. Which literary feature is central to Sheers's poetic technique?

    • Long Latin catalogues that list the gods, places and ancestors of the classical world
    • Comic farce, with mistaken identities, slammed doors and rapid exchanges of dialogue
    • Vivid imagery drawn from landscape
    • Strict heroic couplets arranged in rhymed pairs of ten-syllable lines throughout

  10. Which poetic form does a reader often expect from a contemporary collection like Skirrid Hill?

    • Free verse
    • Anglo-Saxon alliteration
    • Ottava rima
    • Strict villanelle

  11. Which term describes the sense of belonging to a particular place?

    • Sense of place
    • Stage direction
    • Caesura
    • Anaphora

  12. Evaluate: how does a Welsh landscape shape the collection's sense of identity?

    • It shows identity has no connection to place
    • It shows the Welsh border was never inhabited
    • It erases national identity in favour of universal themes
    • It ties personal identity to a specific national and local setting

  13. Which period of Welsh history does a reader associate with the war-remembrance theme?

    • The twentieth century's world wars
    • The Tudor reformation, when the monasteries were dissolved and their lands were sold
    • The Roman occupation, when legions built forts and roads across the hills of Wales
    • The Norman conquest, when castles were raised to hold the Welsh border against the lords

  14. Which broader Option B theme does Skirrid Hill share?

    • Personal and social identity
    • Antique collecting, including the buying and cataloguing of old furniture and silver ware
    • Naval strategy, including the tactics used by fleets to block enemy ports and supply lines
    • Trade tariffs, including the taxes that governments placed on imported goods at the border

  15. Which phrase describes a poem that moves from personal memory to public history?

    • Rhyming couplet, in which each pair of lines ends on the same rhyme sound throughout
    • Circular structure only, in which the final stanza repeats the opening lines word for word
    • Strict acrostic, in which the first letters of each line spell out a hidden message
    • Movement from personal to public

  16. What role does memory play in the collection's poems?

    • It is restricted to official records, which alone can tell the truth about the past
    • It is irrelevant to identity, since people form their sense of self from the present only
    • It preserves the past and shapes present identity
    • It is only a source of comedy, used to amuse the reader with odd recollections

  17. Which concept best describes the poet's engagement with the past through local detail?

    • Mock-heroic satire
    • Universal abstraction
    • Historical particularity
    • Pastoral escapism

  18. Which kind of text is Skirrid Hill most likely to be placed alongside in a shared study?

    • Restoration comedies, with witty dialogue, gallants and sexual intrigue in London
    • Other post-2000 poems exploring memory and place
    • Victorian sensation novels, with hidden crimes, secret marriages and mysterious wills
    • Ancient epics of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey with their heroes and gods in battle

  19. Which feature of Sheers's poetry allows readers to feel the physical texture of landscape?

    • Legal terminology
    • Sensory imagery
    • Abstract logical argument
    • Mathematical notation

  20. Which concept describes the way a landscape can hold the traces of history?

    • Refrain
    • Palimpsest
    • Zeugma
    • Acrostic

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