Quantuc is the Celtic word for a rim or circle, and a ton is an Old English settlement; the Quantocks are literally 'the settlement by the rim of hills'. The ridge runs about fifteen miles from the Vale of Taunton in the south north-west to the Bristol Channel at Kilve, never very high - the summit at Wills Neck stops at 1,261 feet - but high enough that on a clear day from its top you can see Glastonbury Tor, the Mendips, the Gower Peninsula in Wales across the Bristol Channel, the Brendons, Exmoor, and the Blackdowns. It is also one of the older worked landscapes in England. Bronze Age round barrows still hump the skyline. Iron Age hillforts crown several of the spurs. Roman silver coin hoards have come out of West Bagborough. The hills were already old when the Saxons gave them the name they still carry.

In the 870s, while a young King Alfred was hiding from the Vikings in the marshy hideout at Athelney to the south-east, he ordered the building of military roads called herepaths to link a network of beacons and forts. The herepath that crossed the Quantocks ran from the ford on the River Parrett at Combwich, past the Cannington hillfort, up the line of the present-day Stowey road to Crowcombe Park Gate, then along the ridge south to the Triscombe Stone. The road was a regulation sixty-six feet wide between deep hedge-laid banks, and remarkably you can still walk it today. The avenue of trees that grew up from those banks survives in places as one of the oldest continuous routes in England. Eight centuries later, in 1685, the same hills witnessed the bloody aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion - supporters of the doomed Duke were hanged in the villages at Nether Stowey and Cothelstone. The Quantocks have always been at the edge of bigger events.

When Coleridge moved into the cramped cottage at Nether Stowey in 1797 he was twenty-five, broke, married unhappily, and brilliant. He persuaded Wordsworth and Dorothy to take Alfoxton House nearby; their three-way friendship over the next year was one of the most productive collaborations in English literature. They walked the hills constantly, sometimes thirty miles in a day, talking out their poems as they went. Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Frost at Midnight in this single year. Wordsworth was drafting the early lyric poems that would establish his ear for ordinary English speech. Dorothy kept the journal that fed both their imaginations - her descriptions of nightingales, hedgerow flowers and the particular look of the combes after rain make their way directly into the brothers' verse. The local authorities, suspicious of the radicals, sent a government spy after them, who concluded they were probably harmless. The Coleridge Cottage at Nether Stowey is now a National Trust property; the fifty-one-mile Coleridge Way walking trail starts at its front gate.

On 7 February 1956 the Quantocks were designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty - the very first such designation in England under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. There was no special reason it had to be first; it just was. The 6,194 acres of heathland, oak coppice, ancient ridgeway and Site of Special Scientific Interest established a model that has since been applied to forty-five other landscapes across England. The hills are still mostly working land - sheep, cattle, forestry plantations, small farms - and there is no single owner. They are managed by an alphabet soup of councils, the National Trust, the Forestry Commission, the Friends of Quantock, and the unbroken local tradition of the Quantock Commoners, whose ponies and red deer still drift through the heather as they have for centuries. The carved bench-ends inside Crowcombe Church, dated 1534, show Green Men and a two-headed dragon fighting local farmers - a reminder that the older imagination is never far from the surface here.