When poets aroused suspicion by studying the life of a mountain stream
lyvhen I go down to my house in the Quantocks, the first thing I do in Nether Stowey, even before I buy the West Somerset Free Press, paragon of local newspapers, is to inspect the stream that flows through the little town. Coleridge called it 'the gutter', an ignoble name for a delightful phenomenon which surges straight down Castle Street, the main thoroughfare, under miniature bridges, and gives the place an air of aquatic distinction. From the level of the stream, to an inch, and to its relative tempestuous or sluggish behaviour — sometimes a mass of foam, at others a slow, stealthy flow — I can tell how much rain has fallen in my absence and whether the hill walks will be boggy or hard.
'Stream': the word is magic to my ear. I love, too, the old Lake District word 'beck' (sometimes gill or ghyll as in Sour Milk Ghyll) and the Scottish 'burn'. We also say brook and the Americans creek. But stream is the king word, summoning up visions of swift motion and crystal-clear icy water, of the chuckle and thrum of white and brown foam over rattling pebbles, and the more intense, lower and resonant note of miniature waterfalls plunging into pools. Once, when I spent summer in a cottage overlooking Buttermere, kindly lent me by Balliol College, I had a beck running through my garden, just underneath my bedroom window. I went to sleep to its fussy, mesmerising chatter and awoke to its steady, sometimes staccato discourse, often made more voluble by rain in the night. It seemed to me then, and still does after half a century, to be the height of human felicity to live and sleep with a pure mountain stream.
The Quantocks are a land of streams. They collect the rainwater on their rocky, mossy tops, and then transport it by hundreds of outlets to the delectable floor of the Vale of Taunton or, on our side, to the River Parrot near Kilve on the Bristol Channel. I say hundreds, but there are five or six arterial streams, never low even in the driest weather, which take their copious waters from deep cisterns high up the hills and keep up a dark, deep, sullen supply all the year round. In addition are the scores of watery veins in the hillsides, sometimes tumultuous and formidable when torrential rain has fallen, at such times roaring in the night and making the entire hillside seem alive with moving and talking liquid. After a week of steady rain, freshets and rills appear out of the ground as if at the drop of a sorcerer's wand, and make their course across the fields, blindly but talkatively feeling their way over the ground and taking tiny pebbles with them to rattle and leave as their mark when the dry times come. As if by magic, too, noisy waterfalls appear on the arterial streams so that from afar, if you listen carefully, the Quantocks seem to thunder softly with the steady drop of many great waters over the stones. At other times, all the waterfalls vanish or become contemptible trickles, rills and freshets are gone as if they had never been, most of the streams turn into dribbles or dry up altogether, the drinking-pools of the red deer on the tops become curdy, dry hollows, and wild animals, brought up on these rich hills to take plenty of food and drink for granted. have to search hard to quench their thirst. This is a good time to observe them.
But I prefer the wet seasons on the whole. One sees then the unity of nature, for the water-system of the hills brings all kinds of substances together in a single activity. The clouds mass and then deposit their superabundant moisture, which infiltrates the hills, transforming them into a mixture of earth, stones and liquid, the last following its desperate natural propensity to find its own level a thousand feet below, and with its mighty collective power thrusting aside earth and rocks to attain its end — to reach the sea, be absorbed by the sun's warmth into cloud-masses, and so begin the whole process again. In the meantime, these moving waters have carried with them countless quantities of rock fragments and mud to lower levels or out to sea so that the hills themselves are constantly changing, and all nature is in continual motion, which can be recorded, if only we have the patience to observe it.
It was this process that obsessed Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth when he at Nether Stowey and they at Alfoxden near Holford spent that magic year, 1797, together and created modern romantic poetry. (Lyrical Ballads was published in Bristol the following year.) They met every day and walked up and down the Quantock-side, from summit to sea. And it occurred to Coleridge and Wordsworth to trace together the exact path of a Quantock stream, from its source spouting out of the topmost hillside to the fulfilment of its destiny in the ocean. Then they would write a poem about it and its perpetual work, and call it 'The Brook'.
Thus they roamed over the countryside, and took notes. Christopher Trickey, a retired huntsman who lived in a tumbledown shack outside Alfoxden gates by the dogpond (still there), was cross-questioned by the strange trio. No one had ever asked about the stream before. Why did they want to know? The local rustics shook their heads together, and concluded that the strangers were French. Coleridge's mixture of broad Devon and Cambridge academic tones seemed to them like a foreign language, and the Westmorland accents of William and Dorothy, distinct although educated, were equally strange and hard to understand. Something fishy? To be sure.
The times were dangerous. The French revolutionaries were overrunning Europe and threatening to invade Old England. Wordsworth was dark 'like a gypsy'. Dorothy was deeply sunburned, dressed in funny clothes, comfortable for rambling but not respectable. Then, they called themselves brother and sister, but who was to say? She had been seen hanging out freshly washed clothes on a Sunday — unheard of! They were poor, but then what were they doing at Alfoxden Manor? (They rented it, furnished, at £23 a year.) Mysterious strangers came and stayed as their guests. Once 12 people dined at the house, and a fierce-looking, flat-faced, lank-haired fellow with a big white hat (a bad sign in those days) had ranted away at the top of his loud voice, according to a local woman who helped Dorothy with the chores. He turned out to be John Thelwall, a man who had been tried for his life for treason. So this, and the evidence of the brook questions, proved the case: the three were French spies, getting information for a landing. A local squire wrote to the Duke of Portland at the Home Office: 'French people had contrived to get possession of a mansion house' and were 'very attentive to the river'. An agent called Walsh was sent down to Somerset. He compiled an elaborate report, which survives, and did some spying on the trio. Mrs Coleridge was not liked in Stowey. The Rector William Holland recorded in his diary, 'No better than she should be.' Coleridge wTote about it all in his Biographia Literatia, calling the agent Bardolph or Spy Nosey. Walsh eventually concluded that nothing was going on except poetry, and that was not exactly a criminal offence. So the affair died down. Half a century later, however, an aged local, questioned about the now celebrated residence of the poets, obstinately repeated, 'They was a bad lot.' The poem was never written. But the stream still flows.
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