Quantock Hills - Cultural References

Cultural References

Coleridge Cottage is a cottage situated in Nether Stowey. It was constructed in the 17th century as a building containing a parlour, kitchen and service room on the ground floor and three corresponding bed chambers above. It has been designated by English Heritage as a grade II* listed building. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived here for three years from 1797 while he wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, part of Christabel, Frost at Midnight and Kubla Khan. Having served for many years as Moore's Coleridge Cottage Inn, the building was acquired for the nation in 1908, and the following year it was handed over to the National Trust. On 23 May 1998, following a £25,000 appeal by the Friends of Coleridge and the National Trust, two further rooms on the first floor were officially opened by William Coleridge, 5th Baron Coleridge.

Poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived at Alfoxton House in Holford between July 1797 and June 1798, during the time of their friendship with Coleridge. The 2000 film Pandaemonium, based on the lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, was set in the hills.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent a few days of their honeymoon at The Plough Inn, Holford, before continuing to the continent in 1912. They returned about a year later to try to help Virginia recover from one of her recurring nervous breakdowns.

The opening of John le Carré's 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is set in the Quantocks. The 1980 Doctor Who episode "Shada" makes a sidelong reference to this region – the Fourth Doctor (played by Tom Baker) claims that walking through the Time Vortex "is a little trick I learned from a space-time mystic in the Quantocks". In the 1980s and 1990s, English novelist Ruth Elwin Harris wrote her Quantock Quartet, a set of novels centred on four sisters growing up around the Quantock Hills during the early 20th century. The novels were later reprinted by Candlewick Press. The Quantocks were also the setting for the final episode of the third series (2006) of Peep Show, while the video to the Bryan Adams hit (Everything I Do) I Do It for You was filmed in the landscape of Holford and Kilve.

'Checking out the Quantocks', is a line from the song Joy Division Oven Gloves by Half Man Half Biscuit from their album Achtung Bono