This unique resource explores Somerset’s extraordinarily rich and varied
literary heritage just waiting to be re-discovered and re-visited. Many of the literary connections in Literary Somerset are well known: TS
Eliot and East Coker, Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Quantocks; but
did you know that Thomas Hardy once lived in Yeovil; or that Virginia
Woolf had her honeymoon in Holford; or that John Steinbeck lived near
Bruton to research the Arthurian legends; or that the weird electrical
experiments of Andrew Crosse at Fyne Court inspired Frankenstein…
or that the vicar of Isle Brewers was once sold for 25/- and then
walked naked across Afghanistan; or that JRR Tolkein had his honeymoon
in Clevedon and that Cheddar Gorge inspired Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings?
Many
of the First World War poets, such as Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas
came to Somerset; Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol; Siegfried Sassoon
is buried in Mells. There is even the story of Breaker Morant, the
Bridgwater-born Bush poet who was executed by firing squad during the
Boer war. Speke of the Nile is buried in Dowlish Wake. Then there are
the Waughs and the Powys clan. Aubrey Herbert even turned down the
throne of Albania twice in favour of Dulverton and Yeovil.
Literary Somerset explores the literary highways and byways of Somerset,
including the cities of Bath and Bristol. In so doing, writer and poet
James Crowden has produced an intellectual road map of Somerset from
Anglo-Saxon times up to the present day. Here you will find more than
350 writers: early chroniclers and opium addicted Romantic poets,
philosophers, pirates and playwrights, eccentric clergymen, diarists and
herbalists, novelists and historians, travellers, chefs and scientists -
from Gildas to John Cleese, Fay Weldon and Terry Pratchett.
James Crowden was born in Plymouth and brought up on the western edge of Dartmoor. He joined the army in 1972 and has travelled widely in the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan. In 1976-77 he spent a winter in the Himalaya trapped for six months in the Zangskar Valley in Ladakh. He studied civil engineering at Bristol and anthropology at Oxford. After a spell in the Outer Hebrides he worked in Bristol Docks as a boatman and then in 1980 settled in Dorset and after five years migrated over the border into Somerset. He worked for twenty years as a casual agricultural labourer involved with cider making, night lambing, sheep shearing and forestry. His first book was Blood Earth & Medicine came out in 1991. Other books include In Time of Flood, Cider the Forgotten Miracle, Waterways, The Wheal of Hope, The Bad Winter, Dorset Man, Dorset Women, Dorset Coast, Dorset Footsteps. In 2009 Ciderland won the Andre Simon Food and Drink Award.
