Qualla: Quantock Hills

Quantock Hills: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John William North, Public domain. In the summer of 1797 William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and a younger poet named Samuel Taylor Coleridge began walking the same combes and ridges almost every day. Coleridge lived in a small cottage at Nether Stowey; the Wordsworths had rented a much grander house called Alfoxton three miles away. They walked, they argued, they read each other's drafts aloud under the oak trees, and by the time William and Dorothy left twelve months later, English poetry had been quietly turned inside out. The Lyrical Ballads they produced - with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written during these walks, as its centrepiece - is usually treated as the start of English Romanticism. It was all written here, on these heathy Somerset hills.

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Image: John William North | Public domain

Quantock Hills: A Rim of Hills

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Webb, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ver...

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Image: Richard Webb | CC BY-SA 2.0

Quantock Hills: Alfred's Herepath

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Bodman, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: Martin Bodman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Quantock Hills: The Walking Poets

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neville Goodman, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 coll...

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Image: Neville Goodman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Quantock Hills: First of Many

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Editor - W.Page; Chapter on Ancient Earthworks - C.H.Bothamley, Public domain. 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 ...

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Image: Editor - W.Page; Chapter on Ancient Earthworks - C.H.Bothamley | Public domain