The installation combines striking images of the Quantock Hills of Somerset with the poetry and artwork being developed by the group of 17 poets, writers, and artists currently co-creating the Quantock Poetry Trail. This poetry trail - actually a series of ‘poetry clusters’ layered across theQuantock Hills and adjoining areas rather than an end-to-end walk - will embed spoken content into the actual fabric of these wondrous hills using modern digital technologies. The content will then be discoverable by anyone with a GPS-enabled smartphone who goes out to experience it!

The poetry and lyrical verse is being created in much the same way Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – the original Romantic poets - created Romantic poetry (‘the poetry of the sublime in the language of the common Man’) at the end of the 18^th century in these self-same hills: we have been going on regular walks together across the high tops and deep twisted combes of the Quantocks since the summer of2022, drawing inspiration from the places they would have known intimately, then retiring to a local pub to ‘talk poetry’. The poetry is site-specific and, literally, grounded; it may be ‘of place’ or ‘evocative of place’ or ‘of emotions evoked by place,’ or inspired by the Romantic poets themselves, the very title of the installation being a nod to Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. We think the young Romantic poets – they were not yet in their 30s when they lived and breathed here - would have approved!

The Quantock Poetry Trail will launch late September2023. It is a project of the Quantock Landscape Partnership Scheme (QLPS),supported by the Heritage Fund. The current installation has been put together by Watchet-based artist Jan Martin and Bristol-based poet and writer Ralph Hoyte, who is coordinating the trail. Members of the group are Elaoise Benson,Richard Burke-Ward, Fiona Campbell, Ann Diment, John Diment, Jon Dovey, Viv Grant, Polly Hall, Ralph Hoyte, Rachel Irven, Anne Lovejoy, Jan Martin, Tick Rowley, Terence Sackett, Angela Wensley, Rachael Wilson, and Angela Wood.

“The seed must lie hid in the earth, or there can be no harvest; 'tis Nature's law.”(William Wordsworth)

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