Lewesdon Hill , William Crowe and William Wordsworth

by James Crowden

Everybody knows about William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and the year they spent with Sam Coleridge in Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, but relatively little is known about the Wordsworth's time in West Dorset immediately prior to this. They arrived in September 1795 and lived in Racedown Lodge until July 1797. Coleridge walked the 44 miles to their house, having preached a sermon in Bridgwater Unitarian, and spent a fortnight there. He then persuaded them to join him in West Somerset. The rest is history. But one hill in particular caught their attention. It was only a few miles away.

Today in West Dorset, as in West Somerset, the clock has been wound back about 100 years. Motor cars are increasingly scarce. Horses and bicycles are rampant. Lockdown, which sounds a bit like a new type of seriously strong glue, means that we are confined to barracks and many people do far more local walking that they ever did before. Their gardens, if they are lucky enough to have one, have become small paradises. Which is not surprising as the word 'paradise' is derived from the old Persian word pairi-daêza meaning walled enclosure, which later referred to ornate pleasure gardens. Everyone must have their own paradise. There is even a paradise apple, which is a very old apple indeed - first recorded in the Hotel St Pol in Paris in 1398. It came from the Caucasus and has been found growing in the wild in Armenia. It was one of the first modern apple rootstocks, released in 1917 and in France was called 'Jaune de Metz'. Being England it now has the far less poetic name of M9 from East Malling Research station in Kent. Many of you may have M9 rootstock for your apple trees without knowing it.

But what has this got to do with West Dorset or West Somerset? The analogy is simply that you may have wondrous things in your garden or on your doorstep which you may have taken for granted all these years, but which are, upon further inspection, far more interesting and historically important than you realise. Like the Dorset knob from Morecombelake. Very good with Blue Vinney and a glass of cider.

But it is two other much larger 'knobs', further inland that really interest me, Lewesdon Hill and Pilsdon Pen 'known to ancient mariners as the 'Cow and Calf' being eminent sea marks to those whose sail upon the coast.' Sea marks are important navigational aids, especially to smugglers…. on moonlit nights. Take Lewesdon Hill, Mount Parnassus of West Dorset. Within easy walking distance if you live in Stoke Abbot or Broadwindsor and well worth the effort of climbing on a fine day. Lewesdon, unlike its next door neighbour, Pilsdon Pen, has tall beech trees upon its slopes, which at this time of year burst into a garish, almost luminescent, metallic green leaf which contrasts beautifully with the sea of blue bells.

Pilsdon Pen is the most prominent of the two hills, with a prow that juts out like an old battleship and is reckoned to be 909ft high. For many years it was assumed that Pilsdon was higher than Lewesdon. But recent more sophisticated surveys say that Lewesdon is six feet higher - which in real terms is a fathom. Many people will have passed Lewesdon Hill on the road between Broadwindsor and Bridport, without giving it a second thought. But Lewesdon Hill has a fascinating story to tell, which like its true height, has been hidden under a bushel for many years.

This story starts in the 1780s, when car parking was not such a problem as it is today. William Crowe, rector of Stoke Abbot, wrote a long poem about walking up Lewesdon Hill on a May morning. His daily exercise. It was published anonymously in 1788 by the Clarendon Press Oxford and was immediately reprinted with his name tally 'WILLIAM CROWE LLB of New College and Public Orator of the University.' It was a sensation and went into several more editions.

William Crowe was an unusual academic. His father was a carpenter who worked in Winchester. As a boy William Crowe was talent spotted and received an education at Winchester College and was then admitted to New College, Oxford and gained a degree in Law. A very bright lad… He became a tutor, then a fellow of New College and Public Orator for the University, a very distinguished position. He held it for many years and delivered speeches in the Sheldonian in Greek and Latin at University functions like degree ceremonies or appear in robes if distinguished visitors turned up.

But for that May Day walk up Lewesdon Hill William Crowe was anything but formal. He was simply walking up the hill with his eyes and ears open, enjoying the beauties of a spring day. He was rector for four years and the ambience of the West Dorset landscape inspired him no end. The poetry was free from the straightjacket of iambic pentameters and the more traditional 18th century classical poetry in the 'Augustan' mode. Well known for its wit, urbanity, revering such classical poets as Virgil and Horace, the Augustan period ended with the death of Alexander Pope in 1744. But nothing much had replaced it, till the Cambridge professor Thomas Gray wrote Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in 1751 about Stoke Poges. This poem broke new ground as all graves do. It became a meditation on death, dying and remembrance. It set the scene for rural poetry and placed poetry back in the shires, in the present. Well away from the London orbit. Rustic mode back in fashion. Then there was Thomas Chatterton the young Bristol poet who committed suicide by taking arsenic in 1770. The same year William Wordsworth was born. Romantic poets were still in wings or even the cradle. There was a slight poetic vacuum that had to be filled. What next?

Then in 1788, the same year that Lord Byron was born, enter William Crowe, the unsung hero of West Dorset who unwittingly sparked a small revolution in poetic terms. His mode of address was very personal, almost casual as if he was having a conversation with a close friend or even himself. He had broken out of Gray's churchyard and strolled up the hill.. He celebrated life not death in blank verse. It was quite literally a breath of fresh air. Energy replaced Elegy.

Lewesdon Hill was a stream of conscious, internal remembrances, like an introspective filmscript. With no obvious rhyme or verse or external setting. But plenty of reason and acute observation of nature and humankind. As if the landscape gave it form and structure. A meditation on the secretive Marshwood Vale laid our below.

But there is a Wordsworth connection and this is where it gets really interesting. Lewesdon Hill was published when William Wordsworth was only eighteen and a student at Cambridge. His first long poem which he had been working on for a number of years was called an 'Evening Walk' about the Lake District was published in 1793 and addressed to a young Lady, in all probability his sister, Dorothy. It is a walk set in the Lake District just like Lewesdon Hill with many natural observations and inner freedoms that became the hall mark of his later verse, including Tintern Abbey and The Prelude.

By chance through a friend in Bristol, Azariah Pinney, William and Dorothy both ended up living beneath Pilsdon Pen at Racedown Lodge owned by the Pinney family. Not a stone's throw away from Lewesdon Hill. Aza sent Wordsworth a copy of Lewesdon Hill in November 1795 and Coleridge had borrowed a copy in March of that same year from Bristol Library. So they had plenty to talk about…

William had been in Revolutionary France and had fathered a child there with Annette Vallon, his French mistress. But that was all hushed up. Sadly there is no journal ( that exists) but they had two important guests at Racedown. Dorothy's old friend Mary Hutchinson who was later to marry William and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was rather smitten with Dorothy and her 'gypsy tan'…William wrote The Borderers here and seriously started writing poetry again, inspired by his sister. The fuse had been lit.

“She gave my eyes, she gave me ears:
humble cares and delicate fears
Maintained a saving intercourse
With my true self, preserved me still. A poet."

A fine tribute from William to Dorothy that I arranged to be carved on a sturdy but elegant wooden gate on the western side of Pilsdon Pen made and carved by Karen Hansen of Evershot. In the words of the Dorset poet Catherine Simmonds 'The landscape of West Dorset, the rural poverty, the words of William Crowe as well as the encouragement of his sister Dorothy provided a vital catalyst to William’s creativity.' As if Wordsworth had used Lewesdon Hill as some kind of template and went much deeper with his introspection. It was a guide, a beacon, a leading mark…

To quote William Crowe:
"Above the noise and stir of yonder fields
Uplifted, on this height I feel the mind
Expand itself in wider liberty.
The distant sounds break gently on my sense
soothing to meditation…"

That is pure William Crowe not William Wordsworth.. And Crowe continues on that introspective vein:

" so methinks
Even so, sequestered from the noisy world
Could I wear out this transitory being
In peaceful contemplation and calm ease."

That notion and honesty and inner meditation is a stepping stone, one of many within the poem, that must have struck a chord with young Wordsworth. It is a real shame that Crowe does not get more recognition for his magnificent poem and its inner workings which inspired the Romantic movement. Someone should film it…

William and Dorothy stayed at Racedown for nearly two years: (September 1795 - July 1797). Far longer than they ever did in Alfoxton House in West Somerset which was their next port of call, to be close to Coleridge in Nether Stowey. William was disillusioned with the French Revolution which had turned very sour, but they were all inspired with creating a revolution in words and poetry. A new society with greater freedom of thought. Even walking was seen as a revolutionary activity.

From Racedown they used to walk for about two hours a day and as Dorothy says:

"We have hills which, seen from a distance almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild state covered with furze and broom. These delight me the most as they remind me of our native wilds."

Her 'native wilds' being the Lake District..

So the poem Lewesdon Hill was well known to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Both poets derived something from it, not just from its lyrical passages, which are quite delightful, but also from its political, libertarian, even pro-republican sentiments. As Professor Jonathan Wordsworth points out in his 1989 introduction to the poem, Lewesdon Hill was in Wordsworth's library and is mentioned in his 1820 Postcript to the River Duddon sonnets. Some critics say it also leads into the Tintern Abbey and Wye Valley poems of 1798. But there is an even closer connection, not just in style, but in content. As I read Lewesdon Hill one phrase jumps out: 'tufted orchards'. Line 10.

James and Catherine Simmonds on the track up to the National Trust’s Lewesdon Hill

Just imagine you are William Crowe, aged only forty three and still sprightly, climbing the hill on May Morning with a poetic air spread all around you, taking in the magnificent views.

"Up to thy summit, Lewesdon to the brow
Of yon proud rising, where the lonely thorn
Bends from the rude South East with top cut sheer
By his keen breath, along the narrow track
By which the scanty-pastured sheep ascend
Up to thy furze clad summit, let me climb:
My morning exercise; and thence look round
Upon the variegated scene, of hills
And woods and fruitful vales, and villages
Half-hid in tufted orchards, and the sea
Boundless, and studded thick with many a sail."

That is only the first page, there are many, many more, and William Crowe is looking down on the Marshwood Vale where small farms are given over to dairy farming, cheesemaking, sheep and cidermaking. Has anything changed in 200 years? Much more follows including not only a very accurate description of the skills needed to be a smuggler but the shipwreck of the Halsewell, an East India man wrecked off Purbeck in January 1786 with great loss of life. Here poetry mirrors real life. Wordsworth must have had that very scene in his mind as he learnt of the death of his brother, John Wordsworth, the captain of the Earl of Abergavenny, a large East Indiaman that sank in a storm in Weymouth Harbour in February 1805.

What really interests me and gives a clue to the use of Lewesdon Hill as an inspiration is that in line 10 the phrase 'tufted orchards' which crops up as 'orchard-tufts' in Wordsworth's famous poem 'Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey' describing the Wye valley near Brockweir. The phrase has been reversed in line 11. A code word, a clue, an enigma, a tribute: even hints of cider to come.

"Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses."

It could just as easily have been William Crowe describing West Dorset. My suspicion is that this was young William's way of acknowledging his debt to William Crowe. It just so happens that a friend of mine has a cider farm above Brockweir above the Wye and there are sycamores and ruined cottages. Cider and poetry always seem to go together. Not much cider in the lake District however…

The view from the summit of Lewesdon Hill - a panoramic shot:

" From this proud eminence on all sides round
The unbroken prospect opens to my view,
On all sides large; save only where the head
Of Pillesdon rises, Pillesdon's lofty Pen:
So called (still rendering to his ancient name
Observance due) that rival height south-west,
Which, like a rampire, bounds the vale beneath.
There woods, there blooming orchards, there are seen
Herds ranging, or at rest beneath the shade
Of some wide-branching oak; there goodly fields
Of corn, and verdant pasture, whence the kine,
Returning with their milky treasure home,
Store the rich dairy: such fair plenty fills
The pleasant vale of Marshwood, pleasant now,
Since that the spring hat): decked anew the meads
With flowery vesture, and the warmer sun
Their foggy moistness drained …
This fertile vale, in length from Lewesdon's base
Extended to the sea, and watered well
By many a rill; but chief with thy clear stream,
Thou nameless Rivulet, who, from the side
Of Lewesdon softly welling forth, dost trip
Adown the valley, wandering sportively."

Mount Parnassus indeed and Paradise all in one hit. Why live elsewhere? West Dorset cider is also very good. So there is far more to Lewesdon Hill than at first sight. William and Dorothy really enjoyed themselves in West Dorset. A quiet antidote to the French Revolution which had greatly disturbed William's mind. William found rest and started to write poetry again. Dorothy did a lot gardening, mending of clothes and even arranged a bride for William: her good friend Mary Hutchinson. Then Coleridge came to stay. I am quite sure they went up Lewesdon Hill and read the poem on its summit which only a mile or two from Racedown. They frequently walked to Crewkerne to get their mail, which was much, much further. Or Lyme Regis to order coal. On one trip to the Cobb, William, ever forgetful, left his horse tied to a lamp post. Just by the small but wonderful narrow bookshop, which was the old coal yard. When he got back to Racedown Dorothy said to him 'EE William.. Where's the 'oss? and 'Where's the coal?' That's poetry for you.

If you cannot make the walk yourself up Lewesdon Hill this year to see the bluebells and beech trees, you can always purchase a facsimile of the original 1788 copy of Lewesdon Hill with a long introduction all about the life of William Crowe. And so, in these troubled times, you can take the virtual journey in words and images, to the summit of Lewesdon Hill

Lewesdon Hill can be ordered through my website: only £5 + p&p . Also see Dorset Footsteps - Wessex Ridgeway Poems which includes several poems about Lewesdon and Pilsdon Pen as well as William and Dorothy Wordsworth and their stay at Racedown Lodge.

Also £5 each + p&p See: www.james-crowden.co.uk