COUNTRY LIFE
ONE of my happiest memories is of the Somerset Quantocks, whose length of a dozen miles of mountain-shaped and wood-cloaked hills separates Exmoor from the Bridgwater flats. Their heathery tops, sylvan, combes (where the pied flycatcher nests), rolling downs and oak-dominant mixed woodlands were, of course, the young inspiration of Coleridge, and the two Wordsworths in 1797 and 1798. The Ancient Mariner was conceived on one of their Quantock walks, and Dorothy, "her eyei watchful in minutest observation of nature," as Coleridge said, wrote' some of the intensest pages of her journal about "smooth Quantock's' airy ridge." Through the window of Alfoxden House (where I have myself stayed) she saw the high curving ramp in the park (above which I have seen the ravens sport and in which is an enormous badgers' sett), "scattered irregularly and abundantly with trees." The deer she saw there have been replaced by Exmoor ponies, and a line of beeches (absent in her time) cOnducts the eye to where the height swings down towards " Kilve's delightful shore." "There is everything here," she wrote, "sea, woods, wild as fancy evEr painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romahtic."
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