Literature connected with Exmoor

Following in the footsteps of writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shelley, Blackmore and Williamson, writers of all kinds have long been attracted to Exmoor. The Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley all came to this area at around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge who lived at Nether Stowey and the Wordsworths nearby at Alfoxden often took long walking tours on what was to become their favourite walk along the rugged and wild Exmoor coast to Lynton & Lynmouth. In the autumn of 1797 they journeyed together along the coast to Lynton and the Valley of Rocks, and during this walk they jointly planned Samuel Taylor Coleridge s most famous and epic poem, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.

The wives of Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were sisters and Southey came many times to Exmoor on family visits walking the coastal path to Lynton & Lynmouth, which he likened to Switzerland - Little Switzerland . He never forgot the area and returned in later life when he wrote the sonnet To Porlock while at the Ship Inn there.

Essayist Charles Lamb and critic William Hazlitt also often visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge and walked with him to the Valley of Rocks travelling for miles and miles on dark-brown heaths overlooking the Channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, until they finally reached Lynton after midnight.

Returning from yet another visit to Lynmouth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge broke his journey retiring to a lonely farmhouse near Culbone and there in an opium induced spell the poem Kubla Khan came to him in a vision in a dream.

During the summer of 1812 Percy Bysshe Shelley honeymooned in Lynmouth at Shelley's Hotel then known as Mrs Hooper's Lodgings. Here Shelley tried to set up a small community of free spirits and composed early radical poetry such as Queen Mab and wrote seditious pamphlets including Declaration of Rights. He was seen distributing copies and fled Lynmouth after being watched by government spies because of his radical activities and writings eventually returning to London.

Richard Doddridge Blackmore's story of the tragic heroine Loma Doone was set in the valleys of Exmoor, it is a romantic tale of love, honour, bravery and treachery during the time of James II and the Monmouth Rebellion. R.D.Blackmore s grandfather was vicar of Oare & Combe Martin and his uncle the rector of Charles near Lynton, he was educated at Blundells School at Tiverton and even though he himself was never a permanent resident within the area as a youth the future novelist spent many holidays with his Exmoor relatives, exploring the countryside of his famous story. Drawing heavily on his Exmoor family background his research into Loma Doone took him all over staying at Lynton, Porlock and Withypool, with the book finally being published in spring 1869.

Over the years Exmoor has inspired many wildlife writers including a trio of famous naturalists, Richard Jefferies, Henry Williamson and W.H. Hudson as well as the historian John Fortescue.

Part of Williamson's international award winning classic Tarka the Otter was set on Exmoor as was his Wild Red deer Of Exmoor and Gale of the World, which was about the 1952 Lynmouth flood disaster.

Former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, always regarded as a nature poet lived close by and set his poem The Stag And Roe-deer on Exmoor and An Otter, rescued from a windswept lane on Exmoor before dawn in winter by a postman, is a personal and touching story.

To this day Exmoor continues to attract and inspire contemporary writers the like of Margaret Drabble with The Witch of Exmoor, her gothic tale about a mad, old matriarch upsetting her relatives and set in a remote house on the Exmoor coast.

Contributed by:Julian Biggs, Elizabeth Montgomery, Freda Jones, Helen Backwell

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