How a Rural Village Saved a Poet’s Creativity
The inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poems
The first thing that struck me as I disembarked from Bridgwater Station in Southwest England and began looking for a taxi that would take me to the rural village of Nether Stowey, population just over one thousand, was that my phone’s data had stopped working. I had traveled a mere forty minutes by train from Bristol, yet I felt like I was in a different world. My data was turned on but there was no reception. The station was on the edge of the town and there were few signs of life.
I began chasing the few taxis I saw waiting at the station entrance. Unfortunately, they had already been booked by other passengers. I finally convinced a taxi driver to call his company and ask for a taxi to be sent for me. I waited around twenty minutes. The car never came. Eventually I flagged down another taxi as the driver dropped off a passenger.
In travelling from Bristol to Nether Stowey, I was tracing the path followed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his family — his wife Sara and their infant child, Hartley — on the last day of the year of 1796, from the city of Bristol. Coleridge often walked the path leading from Bridgwater to this village, but on this visit he traveled in a carriage with all his possessions and his family.
