Taking a Walk Adam Nicolson
It is the time of year to go for a night walk. Pick a full moon (the next is the night of 22nd April) and by far the best place I have ever had a moon walk is in the Quantocks in Somerset. Coleridge and Wordsworth and Mrs Coleridge and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy lived there from the middle of 1797 until the following summer. They weren’t all in the same house but a few convenient walking miles apart, the Coleridges crammed into a damp and horrible hovel in Nether Stowey (now super done up and belonging to the National Trust) and the Wordsworths (with servants) in a country house three miles away in its own park at Alfoxden.
Walking was what they did, as a way of feeling close to nature, and as a democratic gesture: no grandee vision of the country from the back of a horse, but down there with it, intimately connected, feeling the wind in their faces and the mud on their boots. People tend to think of Coleridge as a drug-wreck and Wordsworth as a stuffed-up Victorian monument, but the great poets of this Quantocks year were young, in their twenties, energetic, anxiously alert to what they could write and be. The first of Dorothy’s journals was written at Alfoxden. The first inklings of the poem that became ‘The Prelude’ were stirring in Wordsworth’s mind in the spring of 1798. Coleridge was writing ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ and probably ‘Kubla Khan’ (although that would not see the light of day for many years after). It was the high point of Coleridge’s tragic life, and the beginning of Wordsworth’s greatness.
They usually worked in the morning, reading and writing, and would set off for a walk only as the light began to fade from the sky. If you want to follow the way they often took, park in the little village of Holford (or at the very nice Combe House Hotel) and set off through the woods and open grasslands of Alfoxden park (the Wordsworths liked to think of it as ‘all the foxes’ den’ but nowadays it is boringly called Alfoxton and is in a sorry state, half abandoned, half redeveloped). Beyond it, though, you can climb up the old stony road on to the great ridge of the Quantocks, looking out over the Bristol Channel to the north, and west into the folds of Devon.
It was a walk they took nearly every day, up from the enclosing trees of the woods around Holford to the big open air of the moory heights, a kind of daily transcendence. At first the moonlight vies with the dropping light of the sun, so that a sheen lies across the colours of the fading day. But go slowly, and the moonlight will soon make for magic. The big Alfoxden beeches throw shadows across the old lane, deep blue within the blue, looking like early photographs, silvered and half real, a Coleridgean world of reduced stimulus and heightened awareness.
You hardly need to go to Tahiti. It is all here in Somerset, earth translated into another language. Theatricality lies all around you. The moon lights up the damp mist down in the Levels to the east, so white it is like a fall of snow. The clouds below the moon are rimmed silver in a blue-black sky, as if they were islands on which a cartographer had somehow illuminated the leading edge. The trees make a shadow lattice on the path in front of you as you come back down through the wooded combes to the village. The lane itself turns to a burnished lead, spotted with pools of lightlessness. Venus goes yellow as it sets, the owls start their hesitant hooting and dogs bark. Unforgettable: no gap between now and 1798.