Qualla: Porlock

Porlock: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk Porlock Beach at low tide and you can see the stumps of trees that grew here when the Bristol Channel was somewhere else. A submerged forest, drowned 7,000 to 8,000 years ago when sea levels rose after the last ice age, still surfaces at every spring low. Walk inland and the road climbs to Porlock Hill at a gradient of one in four, steep enough that there is a paid toll road just to avoid it. Between the buried forest and the impossible hill sits a village of fewer than 1,500 people, in a position that has been quietly important since the Vikings tried to land here in 914.

Read more: Porlock on Qualla

Image: Roger Cornfoot | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porlock: An enclosure by the harbour

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Porlock comes from Old English: port for harbour and loca for enclosure. The Domesday Book of 1086 records it as Portloc. Above the village rises Bury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort that watched over the same harbour two thousand years before the Saxons named it. Porlock ...

Read more: Porlock on Qualla

Image: Roger Cornfoot | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porlock: The person on business

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Daniels, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had retired, due to illness, to 'a lonely farm house between Porlock and Lynton.' He claimed to have fallen asleep over a book about Kubla Khan and dreamed an entire poem of two or three hundred lines, perfect and complete. He woke and be...

Read more: Porlock on Qualla

Image: Steve Daniels | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porlock: Suspected spies

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coleridge was not alone in these hills. William Wordsworth lived nearby at Alfoxden, and the two friends roamed the coast and moors on long walks, sometimes at night, sometimes in pouring rain. Their behaviour seemed odd enough to local gossips that someone reported them as possi...

Read more: Porlock on Qualla

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Porlock: Aurochs on the beach

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr Duncan Pepper, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1999, walking the same beach where Bronze Age stumps protrude at low tide, someone found bones. They turned out to belong to an aurochs, the massive wild cattle that roamed Europe and North Africa for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct in the early 17th centur...

Read more: Porlock on Qualla

Image: Dr Duncan Pepper | CC BY-SA 2.0

Porlock: Lorna Doone country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RobThinks, CC BY-SA 4.0. Porlock sits inside Exmoor National Park, and the moor above it produces the landscape that R. D. Blackmore turned into Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. The 1869 novel is half history, half legend, and most of its geography is real. The Doones of Badgworthy Water are still local...

Read more: Porlock on Qualla

Image: RobThinks | CC BY-SA 4.0