Over the Quantocks

This is Coleridge Country.  After staying with friends in Watchet, where Coleridge apparently found his initial inspiration for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we stayed for two nights at an inn called The A.M. in Nether Stowey.  It stands opposite Coleridge Cottage, now a National Trust property, where Coleridge lived from 1797-99, unhappily married.  His temporary saviours (from depression and opium addiction) were the Wordsworths (brother & sister), who moved into a mansion (Alfoxton) close by and became, in Coleridge’s words, “three people, but only one soul”. 

We walked in his footsteps from Staple Farm (ST 109416) in West Quantoxted, intending to follow the “Great Road” over the hills to Holford.  It was a drovers’ road to Bridgewater and Salisbury, for sheep.  (There are many more tracks than those on the Explorer map, all of them equally beautiful.  Just keep going south-east.  We spent half the time on a different “Great Road”.  Anyway, if you’re north of the cairn, which you technically shouldn't be, you get a good view of the Welsh coast – and Hinkley Point C power station!)


(And the larksong! - if you're lucky enough to have a reasonable pair of ears - .  Hail to thee, blithe spirit etc.)

I can’t really explain the holly trees (#1), but I think the originals were markers for drovers, like the Yew Trees in Hampshire.  But the best part of the walk was coming down the hill (#2) through the beech wood at Alfoxton (#3) – where the Wordsworths moved to in 1797 – which seemed to go on for ever but is probably only a few hundred yards from end to end.  It’s beautiful, anyway.

What surprised us more than anything, however, was the “Dog Pound” below the wood (#4,5).  Was it where wolves were collected and shot?  No, the explanation was more mundane, but tragic.  This excerpt comes (edited) from the website “Off the Beaten Track in Somerset”:

“The (possibly apocryphal) story behind the Holford Dog Pound is that at some unspecified time in the past the pack of hounds used in hunts were kept on the Alfoxton estate.  The meat used to feed them was hung high in trees out of their reach until it was needed.  However, the meat attracted local stray dogs, which one night disturbed the hounds; so the huntsman went out to investigate.  But, without his hunting clothes on, he wasn’t recognised by his own hounds, who attacked and killed him. The dog pound was built for stray dogs, who could be incarcerated so that they wouldn't disturb the hounds.”

But why were the strays punished and not the hounds?  Why didn’t the huntsman keep his hounds locked up at night?...etc. etc.  Surely much more likely that the huntsman was killed by the strays…

But it’s a fascinating piece of history; and a warning never to go out at night without canine-friendly clothing.  Which brings me - loosely - to one of my favourite verses from The Ancient Mariner:

          Like one that on a lonesome road

          Doth walk in fear and dread,

          And having once turned round walks on

          And turns no more his head;

          Because he knows a frightful fiend

          Doth close behind him tread.

Couldn’t resist that.