Exmoor - Nether Stowey & The Great Wood
We had not explored the beautiful area of Exmoor before, so this was a much-anticipated holiday. Having broken our journey with an overnight stop, we journeyed on toward our destination on Saturday morning with time to stop and explore other places - the first being Nether Stowey, briefly the home of Samual Coleridge, poet, and author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Nether Stowey is known as the Gateway to the Quantock Hills.
The plaque on the wall of Coleridge's cottage. We didn't go in but took the picture!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was (born on 21 October 1772 and died 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.
He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (I did this one at school!) and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential.
Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.
It`s amazing that a man held in such high esteem, in his lifetime and still today, should have produced what he did under such difficult conditions which lasted all his life.
Nether Stowey is a pretty Somerset village with a stream flowing through the street.
Then we journeyed on through what is known as the Great Wood. Some of the following images were taken a few days later when we returned briefly to the area.
Other eye-catching sights are the huge ants' nests in the area.
- and then of course, what visit would be complete without a view of the Exmoor ponies? We had started to walk away from the car when I remembered something, and I returned to find the ponies licking the car for some reason! They had just appeared from amongst the trees as they were not in sight as we arrived.
Dead Woman's Ditch is an earthwork which has been scheduled as an ancient monument. It is a linear earthwork consisting of a bank with a ditch along the west side running for approximately 950 metres (3,120 ft). The earthwork is presumed to be of prehistoric origin and is of unknown purpose.
The 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) long earthwork has been cut through by later tracks and a road. It is badly eroded in places.
Dead Woman's Ditch is sometimes associated with the murder of Jane Walford by her husband John in 1789 but the name predates the murder, appearing on an earlier map.
So far so good - now to drive to our holiday let in Porlock Weir.
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