THE COLERIDGE WAY

It's 250 years since the birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great poet and lover of nature and landscape. Ben Lerwill celebrates by exploring a spectacular hiking route named in the poet's honour, through the lovely hills of West Somerset

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.' These words, conjured in a 1797 postopium haze by a Romantic poet and subsequently taught to generations of inky-fingered schoolchildren, still echo with the exotic strangeness of distant lands. But the poem's roots are far closer to home. The lines were penned - or rather quilled - in a squat Exmoor farmhouse overlooking the Bristol Channel, in a part of the country deeply familiar to the poem's moon-eyed author. Jump forward to today and I'm leaning on a five-bar gate at the edge of the same farm, enjoying billowing views across the sea towards Wales.

The writer in question, of course, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man whose literary reputation still ripples through the centuries. His works, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, will continue to be referenced long into the future. Coleridge was born in the Devon town of Ottery St Mary in October 1772 almost exactly 250 years ago - and grew up to become not just a hugely important poet but also a critic, philosopher and theologian.

He remains highly influential today, despite the fact that his 61 years were plagued by both anxiety and addiction. "His genius," wrote the 19th-century critic William Hazlitt, "had angelic wings."

A WRITER'S LANDSCAPE

The soft valleys and coastal meadows of West Somerset and North Devon might lack the lavish Mongolian palaces of Xanadu, but they clearly held enough to enchant Coleridge, who passed some of his most fruitful years here. I'm finding this out in one of the most enjoyable ways possible, by spending three late-summer days meandering along the 51-mile Coleridge Way. The trail begins in the Quantock Hills before undulating gently- and occasionally steeply-across Exmoor to the coast.