Nether Stowey

This page is one of those to enable the Friends to share activities and opinions from different places where Coleridge lived and worked. Do please email us (tsackett@btinternet.com) with information about forthcoming events and articles which you might wish to share. As time goes on we will build a picture of the impact and influences these special places had on Coleridge’s life and thought. So do please send us material to start the ball rolling.

1796 Moves to Nether Stowey, Somerset with family.

1797 Friendship with Tom Poole. Assciation with Worthworth develops; William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Charles and Mary Lamb, stay at Stowey; Coleridge writes This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison; Wordsworths move to Alfoxden, near Stowey; Coleridge publishes a second edition of ‘Poems’; writes Kubla Khan and Part One of Christabel; attempts at collaboration with Wordsworth fail and Coleridge begins The Ancient Mariner; works for the 'Morning Post'.

1798 Accepts Wedgwood annuity; Berkeley born (May); finishes The Ancient Mariner; writes Frost at Midnight, France: An Ode, and Fears in Solitude – published as a book later in the year; Lyrical Ballads (co-authored with Wordsworth) published, containing The Ancient Mariner; travels to Germany with the Wordsworths and Wordsworth begins The Prelude, the Poem to Coleridge. Leaves Nether Stowey for London in 1799.

Coleridge Cottage, Nether Stowey – National Trust

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To visit the National Trust website Click here

A brief history of Coleridge Cottage

Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey from 1797 to 1800. The cottage in Lime Street, in which he wrote some of his most famous poetry, was built in the 17th century; it had a parlour, a kitchen and a service room on the ground floor, and three corresponding bedchambers above.

All these rooms survive today. When Coleridge arrived, the original kitchen had been converted to a second parlour and Sara used the service room for cooking. The 'nice well of fine spring water' which Coleridge noted also survives in a courtyard behind the building. So too does part of the long garden behind the cottage, from which a gateway gave access to the garden of his beloved friend Tom Poolewith its 'lime tree bower'.

The cottage was refurbished in 1800, and it was probably then that the present sash windows replaced the former casements. In the 19th century it was enlarged when it became Moore's Coleridge Cottage Inn.

The cottage was acquired for the nation in 1908 by a group of scholars and enthusiasts, and the following year it was handed over to the National Trust. Click here to read the story of the campaign to acquire Coleridge Cottage.

The latest 2011 redevelopment was carried out by the National Trust with financial support from Viridor Credits, the Quantock Centre, The Friends of Coleridge, and ALRC.

The Cottage is open seven days a week from 11am to 5pm.

To read an account of the acquisition, click here.

Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth night walking in the Quantock Hills

Click to read

An imagined walk from Racedown to Crewkerne with Coleridge and the Wordsworths, by David Stevens

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David Stevens, a loyal Friend of Coleridge, has written an account of the walk that STC, Dorothy and William Wordsworth took from Racedown to Crewkerne in June 1797. It is a vividly imagined description of conversation and place.

Click here to read a PDF file of the work, which David hopes to develop into an illustrated booklet. It is well worth a read!