But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Whilst Coleridge was first writing down the words of Kubla Khan, which he claimed to have composed whilst in a laudanum-induced trance, he was famously interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’, causing him to forget much of the verse.
Porlock is on the Exmoor coast, east of Lynmouth and over the border into Somerset. We visited Porlock for our first time on Monday. It turned out to be very nice…
