to engage with the world of business or work, politics or the theatre, they would also travel east, to Bristol or on to London. But whenever they needed stimulus or adventure, beyond what the Quantocks themselves could provide, they walked west, to hardness, over the high tops and on into the wild woods and rocky valleys of Exmoor and Devon. Again and again in the poetry of this year, the implications of this hard but riven landform make themselves apparent: a clear and distinct difference between empty hill and occupied valley, high tops and buried combes, with the brilliant streams acting as the veins and arteries of the whole body of country.
The lane at the southern end of Stowey, just along from Tom Poole’s house, soon leaves behind the clustered domesticity of the village. The road itself in summer is dry and stony, rimmed with the grey-pink dust of the Quantocks, while a stream, which even in July does not fail, runs down the ditches, the first of the bubbling watercourses that give the Quantocks, for all their southern Englishness, a sense of mountain life. They were what Dorothy loved when she first came here: the ever-present sound of water over stones. And so here, physically and immediately, is the first pair of qualities which make this a stimulating place: orderliness and vitality, a mutually enriching and fertile meeting of the natural and the cultural, Welsh poppies growing in the gravel next to a cottage door.
Jungle Lane
In the height of summer there is a thickness and a richness here too, no northern austerity. Leaves shadow the world. Bindweed is in the hedges and the brambles are in flower. Lady’s bedstraw and mallows grow in the shady damp places under the hedges. The roses overtop the garden walls, up and over them, dropping in long tendrils into the lane. Wood-pigeons hoot and strum in the garden trees, and the meadowsweet bubbles beside the road.
The boundary between the cultivated lowland and the hill is quite sharp, no suburban blurring. A stream runs along the floor of the lane itself. Hazels and field maples arch it over into a green tunnel ‘so overshadow’d, it might seem one bower’, and the sun pushes in there in narrow rods, so that the watery floor is spattered and mapped in leopardskin light.
This is the first slight lift of the hills away from Nether Stowey, but the sensation is not of climbing on to the hill but into it, following the wet shaded path as if into a vein. Even on a hot summer day the damp hangs and clings in there. Big lolling hart’s-tongue ferns, feathery polypody ferns and others more like giant shuttlecocks, with the luxuriant undergrowth of dog’s mercury around them, make a jungled Amazonian lushness beside the stream. A broad-bladed frondy apron of fern spreads over the water. This is an English rainforest, coomby with buttercups and little cranesbills, water dropwort and fat, snaking ivies on the trunks of the trees, the whole place womblike, interior. Beyond the hedges, the sunlit meadows beside the lane are spangled with daisies as if they belonged to another and more obvious world.
Whichever way you climb, whether through the damp combes made by the streams or on the old charcoal burners’ tracks that net the hills on all sides, you soon come to the next element: the Quantock oakwoods, one of the great, scarcely regarded beauties of England. They coat the flanks and thighs of each hill, coppiced every sixteen years or so in the 1780s and 90s, so that each new oak, as it grew, curled towards the light, competing with its neighbour. The result is a wriggling snakepit of a wood, in which the trees weave and twist upwards, blotched with lichen, the dancing stems springing from mossy and ferny groins, sometimes four or five to each stool. Their canopy, thirty or forty feet above the bilberries or whortleberries, creates a mosque-like room in which the green carpet of the berries glimmers for thousands of acres beneath them, lined out in avenues of sun-spotted green, an arcaded temple and shrine to growth and light.
In the early morning, when the leaves are grey with dew, the air in these oakwoods is as cool as a glass of cider. Cloud floats in the tops of the woods like another element, another sphere between you and the blue of the sky. Occasionally a big old pollard oak hangs its branches over the path. This is not wild country, not impressive in the way of grand or famous landscapes – far more intimate than that, and thick with the sensation that Wordsworth came to embrace in the course of this year. In some unused manuscript lines from 1798 he described how, after he had been walking for a long time in a remote and lonely place, away from people,
If, looking round, I have perchance perceived
Some vestiges of human hands, some stir
Of human passion, they to me are sweet
As light at day break or the sudden sound
Of music to a blind man’s ear who sits
Alone & silent in the summer shade.
They are as a creation in my heart …
Those words record the education of a mind, the sudden seeing of what had not been seen before. Man and nature fuse in those places. Human presence is no pollution in these woods, but the means by which a communal, multi-generational beauty has evolved, the co-production of man and the world of which he is a part. This is also part of the great gospel of interfusion of all in all and each in each to which this year is dedicated. When the wind is right, the bells of Holford church reach deep into the air between the trees.
Beyond the woods the world changes again, and the path emerges on to the tops, just above the treeline, or at least into one of the wind-sheltered nooks still surrounded by the wood but open at its upper edge. All above you, hill country: an occasional thorn, abused by storms or grazing mouths, and hung in the sunlight with gossamer threads, standing among the heather and gorse, the scrambled feathers of a young pigeon, a peregrine kill, a pair of buzzards mew-crying over the trees, tormentil in the acid turf.
Ahead, the lit outlines of the open-headed hills, a sun-drenched roof for the world. Over to the north, the Bristol Channel, with its two little islands, and the hazed Welsh mountains beyond them, to the east the milky distance of the low moors of the Somerset Levels, and on the far side the steady line of the Mendips.
It is a place, in that sunshine, to lie down and look: the woods on the lower slopes of these hills, the scatter of big farms and fields beyond them, multicoloured, green and tan, the shadowed hollows and dips in the farmland, the grey-blue plume of a distant bonfire smoking in the sun. Pies and doughnuts of woods dropped across the chequered fields.
Wordsworth loved to remember precisely how ‘in many a walk’, as he wrote later in his notebook, when they had reached this top and
reclined
At midday upon beds of forest moss
Have we to Nature and her impulses
Of our whole being made free gift, – and when
Our trance had left us, oft have we by aid
Of the impressions which it left behind
Looked inward on ourselves, and learn’d, perhaps,
Something of what we are.
The mind and the world were – ‘perhaps’ – part of one substance. To look outward was to look inward. The perceiving self was only the finest of strata buried in that doubly enveloping universe. The inner world was as vast as the outer. All the old impressions were ringing in his heart. Here was a place where the very movement of coming up and out allowed a movement down and in, the geography of the self becoming an inverse mirror of the material and external world.
It was true for Coleridge too. He described in his notebook how, when he forgot a name, only by not thinking of it could he remember it:
