When at school I first read The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan, I imagined they had been written in some grand setting befitting, as I thought, the status of such a great poet. Only in later years, when I read about the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, did I come to realise that this was far from the truth, and my eventual visit to Nether Stowey confirmed it.
It was in Nether Stowey in 1797 that Coleridge, almost destitute, called on his friend, Thomas Poole, for help. Poole, the owner of a local tannery, responded by offering a modest 17th century thatched cottage in Lime Street to house the poet, his wife and newborn son.
Coleridge felt the Spartan appearance of the cottage coupled with ascetic living would be good for the soul – a stimulus to his emotions and perhaps his creativity. It seemed to work. In the three years he lived here, stimulated by his surroundings, encouraged by his friends, William and Dorothy Wordsworth (who were living at Alfoxton House, near Holford, at the time) and aided by opium-enhanced reveries, Coleridge produced some of his greatest and best-known poetry.
A sketch of the cottage from 1837 (at one time displayed in the parlour) suggests what the building was like when Coleridge and his family lived there. However, it underwent substantial alterations in the late 19th century: the roof was raised and the thatch replaced by slate; the front elevation was altered, and rooms were added at the rear.
Only the four front rooms on the ground and upper floors are original and unchanged since Coleridge's day and now house manuscripts and memorabilia. In the small garden behind the cottage, the “lime tree bower” of the poem (“The Lime Tree Bower My Prison”) has long since gone, but the bay tree still stood at my last visit.
The National Trust took over the cottage two years after acquiring its first large property, Barrington Court, in 1907. Thus 2009 marks the centenary of the Trust's ownership of Coleridge Cottage – good cause perhaps to raise a glass during the lunch that precedes our visit on 1 April!
Jim Clifford