Escape from the present day for a weekend of time-travel, poetry reading and foot-stepping in Somerset where, two hundred and twenty-five years ago, a quiet revolution took place.

In the summer of 1795, a bright-eyed young poet called Samuel Taylor Coleridge, having walked from Nether Stowey in Somerset to Racedown Lodge, at the foot of Pilsdon Pen in West Dorset, leapt over a gate and bounded through a pathless meadow to introduce himself to a fragile young man called William Wordsworth. They became instantly inseparable, and Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, then moved to Alfoxden House in Holford, Somerset in order to be near Coleridge and his wife, Sara, whose rundown cottage was three miles away.

The landscape of the Quantocks, one of the most mysteriously atmospheric places in England, inspired Coleridge’s finest poetry. The panoramic views, dense woods, ancient parks, heathland, and oak woods of  ‘Dingly Dell Land’ are caught in his description of Xanadu in ‘Kubla Khan’:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

For the first time in English verse, the subject of the poems would be real people rather than Gods, heroes and aristocrats.

Watching the tall ships at the harbour at Watchet, Coleridge first imagined ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the best known poem in the language, in which a sea voyage is doomed when a sailor shoots an albatross, and from this grew the idea for Lyrical Ballads, a collaborative collection in which Wordsworth described the natural world and Coleridge the supernatural world. For the first time in English verse, the subject of the poems would be real people rather than Gods, heroes and aristocrats.