Quantock Hills. An Area of Outstanding Beauty

See the landscapes that inspired the birth of the Romantic Movement and walk from the Quantock Hills into Exmoor National Park. 36 miles from Nether Stowey to Porlock, you will find breathtaking views, forests, streams and wide open country.

Read about projects taking place along the Coleridge Way in this new blogspot http://www.coleridgeway.blogspot.co.uk/

or look at stunning images of the Coleridge Way on our Pinterest board (you can also find route maps here) http://pinterest.com/quantockhills/coleridge-country/

For information about walking the Coleridge Way and to download the route go to www.coleridgeway.co.uk

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was only 25 when he moved to Nether Stowey in 1797.  During the next three years he would write poetry which would change the way we saw the world forever, and the Romantic Movement would be born.

William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy soon moved down from Bristol to join the Coleridges in their rural retreat.  They rented the rather less modest nearby Alfoxton Park, and the three friends spent many hours roaming the hills, talking and finding inspiration in the wild beauty of the Quantock Hills.  Together they planned a collection of poetry called The Lyrical Ballads.  This radical collection of poems marked the very beginning of English Literary Romanticism. The significance of this poetry on our lives today cannot be underestimated. The Romantic Movement changed (amongst other things) how we see the natural world, and began the movement that lead to the national protection of our finest landscapes, including the Quantock Hills.

Twitter #coleridgeway

Places to visit:

Coleridge Cottage, Nether Stowey click here

Hestercombe Gardens click here

Watchet click here

Walks

7 mile circular walk Holford - Dorothy's Waterfall - Alfoxton Park Discoveringbritain

36 mile route from Nether Stowey to Porlock - Coleridge Way

Short circular routes in the Quantocks - circular walks

Eat and Stay click here

Useful Links

Coleridge Memorial Project click here

For schoolchildren - Quantock education

Friends of Coleridge - click here

Richard Holmes, Coleridge's most well known biographer

Photo: Courtesy of Julien Temple, from the film Pandaemonium

Quote below from article in The Telegraph By Victor Osborne

12:01AM BST 06 Jul 2002

Literary landscape: Coleridge's Somerset

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, known as Sam to his family, was born in the vicarage of Ottery St Mary in Devon in 1772 and spoke with a West Country burr all his life. He moved to a cottage in Nether Stowey - "the hovel", he called it - with his wife, Sara, and baby son, Hartley, in 1797 to be close to his patron Tom Poole and to concentrate on writing. It was damp and mouse-ridden. In a letter to a friend, he described his routine. He cultivated his large vegetable garden in the early morning, followed by reading and composing, back to the garden in the afternoon, attend to the pigs and poultry, more literary work until the evening and, at night, socialise with "the very pretty young women of Stowey. We are very happy

Coleridge lived in the cottage for less than two years before going to Germany in September 1798 to study. Yet here he produced much of his finest work in verse - including Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight, and began the collaboration with William Wordsworth on The Lyrical Ballads. This inaugurated the Romantic movement in England, which, in turn, would revolutionise the world of poetry. Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, rented the gentleman's residence of Alfoxton Park for a year and either he or Coleridge would walk the three miles to the other almost every day.

Mr Rudolf and I follow the road to Alfoxton, which rolls up and down across the toes of the Quantock Hills. The grass verges are candy-coloured with wild flowers, cow parsley, buttercups, poppies, speedwell and grape hyacinths. It is so good to see fields again full of cows and sheep. But one lasting casualty of foot and mouth is the pub at Holford where we had hoped to have lunch; it is now closed because trade collapsed.

Alfoxton Park has become a country hotel, which the owners have kept in the style of the original house, although it seems to be the wrong way round, facing a steep hill and turning its back on the lovely view across country to the Bristol Channel. We ask directions to Dorothy's Glen, a ravine with a waterfall and rushing stream that Coleridge described in the poem This Lime Tree Bower My Prison: "The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep/And only speckled by the midday sun." The friends often walked from here to Kilve on the coast, following Holford Stream. They must have had the agility and stamina of mountain goats. The glen is so steep that I fear a wrong step will have me tumbling uncontrollably to the rocks below. I sit down for safety and find myself in a dense white drift of aromatic wild garlic.

Coleridge and Wordsworth planned to write a poem called The Brook, which would be an allegory for the course of human life. The stream was the inspiration and their interest in it and whether it was navigable, together with their extensive walking and openly expressed support for the French Revolution, aroused great suspicion. The government sent an agent down from London to investigate whether they were spies preparing for a French invasion.

Cliffs containing fossils edge the beach at Kilve and low tide reveals amazing Jurassic-era rock formations that look like the devil's crazy paving. A coastal path runs from here to the small port of Watchet. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was conceived on a walk there with the Wordsworths and from the descriptions in the poem it was the place he sailed from and returned to.

He was to leave Somerset and endure a prolonged period of turmoil during which his marriage collapsed, he quarrelled with Wordsworth, his work suffered and his opium addiction became acute. But in that brief time at Nether Stowey, Coleridge wrote some of the most sublime lyrical and visionary poetry we possess.'

Martin Hesp Western Morning News, West county Walks

Click here

Some good references from Coleridge's works referring to the Quantock landscape