The Coleridge Way

Kate Green meanders on Exmoor

In 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was irritated to be disturbed by a ‘Person from Porlock’ as he struggled to compose Kubla Khan. The intruder might have expected a warmer welcome as it’s a bracing five-mile climb to the farmhouse on the Exmoor coast where the poet had retired sick, addled by opium and probably stuck for inspiration anyway.

The 20th-century poet Stevie Smith suspected as much—‘o Person from Porlock come quickly/and bring my thoughts to an end,’ she wrote—and Robert Graves, Arthur Conan Doyle, Colin Dexter, Louis Macneice and Douglas Adams all subsequently nodded to the muchmaligned interrupter.

Coleridge’s sojourn on the wild country above Porlock Bay was but brief, yet it’s served as a useful inspiration for the Coleridge Way (the fingerposts all bear quill-pen motifs), a walk devised in 2005 on linking footpaths between Porlock and nether Stowey, the Quantock village in which the poet lived for three years.

It’s a pretty indirect, fanciful route, even for a hallucinating poet, weaving as it does inland and up and down steep combes. In 2014, it was extended west to Lynmouth on the north Devon border, where it meets the South West Coast Path.

What the Way does, however, is shine a deserved light on a beauteous hinterland of boundless heathery skylines, silent green valleys and ancient villages—the ‘purpleheaded mountain, the river running by’ of All Things Bright and Beautiful is here —which, mercifully, tends to be ignored by travellers thrashing down the M5.

The guide provided by Visit Exmoor’s website (www.visit-exmoor.co.uk/coleridge-way) usefully divides it into roughly four-mile chunks. Bus stops are scarce, but good pubs aren’t—the Bicknoller Inn, notley Arms in Monksilver, The Valiant Soldier in Roadwater and The Rest and Be Thankful Inn in Wheddon Cross are all excellent.

Anyway, it’s a walk that should be meandered rather than marched, as there’s a lot of standing and staring to be done, at the 360˚ panorama of bracken-clad Quantocks, the Brendons’ bleak, sheep-dotted fields and high beech hedges, the big skies of Exmoor and, beyond the ‘grey channel’, the Welsh mountains, which, on a clear day, look touchable.

The Poet Laureate Robert Southey, Coleridge’s friend, wasn’t wrong when he wrote to his brother: ‘Tom you have talked of Somersetshire and its beauties but you have never seen the finest part. The neighbourhood of Stowey, Minehead and Porlock exceed anything I have seen in England before.’

Either of these starting points is immediately striking —Shelley described Lynmouth as ‘a fairy scene’—and there are numerous bewitching historic and literary references to contemplate. From nether Stowey, where the national Trust manages Coleridge Cottage, the path hugs the northern end of the gentle Quantock Hills, passing through the Trust-owned Alfoxton, where the Wordsworths rented, and above my old school at St Audries.

On the other side, at Monksilver, there’s 15th-century Combe Sydenham, where my late father managed the forestry, and Sir Francis Drake’s ‘cannonball’, a meteorite that, legend has it, crashed through the roof of Stogumber church where Sir George

Sydenham was hastily trying to marry off his daughter Elizabeth before her betrothed returned from the high seas (happily, Drake claimed his bride in the nick of time).

The sculptress Rachel Reckitt, who hunted with the West Somerset, lived among the deep folds of the Roadwater valley at Golsoncott and her niece, the novelist Penelope Lively, was influenced by childhood holidays there.

The Way climbs, via old mineral lines and Chargot Manor, to the foothills of Dunkery Beacon before winding down through tranquil Horner Wood, below Cloutsham Farm, where the sporting artist Lionel Edwards stayed for the hunting. Beyond Porlock, where Southey stayed at the Ship Inn and reported ‘a decent pot de chambre and no fleas’, it ascends through the trees my father looked after in the 1950s and the fields by St Beuno’s at Culbone, reputedly England’s tiniest church, and Ash Farm, where Coleridge languished.

There’s Oare Church, where Lorna Doone was shot by Carver, Watersmeet, where Tarka the Otter fought with Deadlock, the feral goats of the Valley of the Rocks, whose prehistoric shapes Percy Bysshe Shelley drew on the backs of old letters, and Lynmouth, where he wrote Queen Mab.

In September, the route became, for four days, ‘Helen’s Walk’, in memory of my beautiful friend Helen Simonson (née Shapland). By Sunday morning, the cavalcade had grown to 52 people, including a coffee team; there had been some horses and there were many dogs. And even for locals, there was much to discover and contemplate. Kate Green Facing page: Journey’s end: Shelley saw Lynmouth as ‘a fairy scene’

‘What the Way does is shine a deserved light on a beauteous hinterland of boundless heathery skylines, silent valleys and ancient villages