The third annual trip to Acton Court

During the hottest day of the recent hot spell, when temperatures locally reached 36.7°C, an early morning walk with the dog would ideally have been followed by a lounge on the settee and some iced water, but my friend, Cathy, and I had tickets for our annual visit to Acton Court, this year accompanied by my friend, Liz, and the homemade cake they serve is too good to miss, so off we went.

Because the temperature was set to rise swiftly during the morning, we got there as soon as the house and garden opened and decided to explore the grounds first - at least, as much of them as we could manage in the already searing heat.

Acton Court is managed by a trust and is only open for the month of June. This means there's a choice to be made: you either go earlier in the month when the wild flowers are at their height, or you delay till the end of the month when the lavender is stunning. The last two years we have set out sights on the lavender, though there were still some flowers to be had ... 

... including some of my favourites: scabious, pyramidal orchid and knapweed.

We had our cake, of course, and tea, and toured the state apartments, which occupy a wing built for the two-day visit of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in the summer of 1535, but it was too hot to linger as long as we might have done on a more normal summer day. At least we didn't have to wear linen shifts, petticoats, corsets and farthingales under our kirtles and ruffs around our necks! 

We'll be back next year, all being well, hopefully on a cooler day.

Hill fort fever: Barbury Castle

Over the last few years, I've developed new loves in the landscape. One is the Ridgeway, a 5000-year-old track that starts at Avebury and ends 87 miles away at Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. I've only walked a couple of short sections of it, from Avebury to West Kennet long barrow, and from the Uffington White Horse to Wayland's Smithy, but it is a place of chalk and magic and I would love to walk its entire length (but know I probably never shall). 

The Ridgeway at Barbury Castle

The other love has come upon me incrementally, and those increments are called Blaise Castle, Brackenbury Ditches, Brent Knoll Camp, British Camp, Bury Hill Camp, Caerleon Hill Camp, Cam Long Down, Castle Ditches Camp, Coney's Castle, Hembury Hill Fort, King's Weston, Lambert's Castle, Leckhampton Camp, Lydford Fort, Maes Knoll, Old Sarum, Small Down Camp, Stokeleigh Camp, Twmbarlwm, Uffington Castle, Wain's Hill ... and others, I'm sure, that have slipped my mind. The hill forts I've encountered on my walks, once a source of interest, now a passion. 

Barbury Castle with the Ridgeway running through it

I don't know what it is about hill forts, but they seem to me to be the thinnest of places, as if the people who lived there and defended them thousands of years ago are still just a heartbeat away. 

So when my daughter needed driving from Bristol to Swindon for an event, I decided to take the dog on a walk somewhere up near there for a change, and as I'd long wished to visit Barbury Castle, which is a few miles south of Swindon and combines hill fort mystique with Ridgeway delight, that's where we went.

Barbury castle has two distinct rings - even three in places - and the size of it means that you can do a walk of a fairly decent length for an elderly woman and a little collie who's approaching middle age and has never really had a work ethic, just by roaming around them, with the added advantage of not getting lost (except in your imagination).

The photos make it look like Cwtch and I had the place to ourselves, but we didn't.  When we arrived the car park was full of teenagers with unfeasibly large rucksacks, but they headed off elsewhere and that was a relief. (For me to derive a degree of self-regulation from my walks, they need to be quiet.) 

But as soon as we got to the fort, it became apparent there were a lot of cyclists coming through ... streams of them, in fact, on a route along the Ridgeway marked by day-glo orange flags. Maybe next time we go there - I would love there to be a next time - we'll choose a week day!

My wildflower ID app - I'm not very good at orchids - identified variously, as broad-leaved marsh orchid, heath spotted orchid and common spotted orchid, what I think were probably all examples of the same species. I suspect we can discount the marsh variety. It's a spotted one, but I'm not sure which.

Top row: orchids of some description, yarrow, scabious, salsify

Middle row: meadow cranes bill, lady's bedstraw, bird's foot trefoil, yellow rattle, small burnet, yellow mignonette

Bottom row: wild carrot, thyme, thyme-leaf sandwort, rough hawkbit, nodding plumeless thistle, creeping cinquefoil

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Meadow brown on hawkbit, thick-legged flower beetle on hoary plantain, marmalade hoverflies on hogweed, a painted lady, six-spot burnets on bird's foot trefoil

The Ridgeway

A visit to Coleridge Cottage and Kilve

My friend, Cathy, and I hadn't been inside Coleridge's storied cottage in Nether Stowey long before one of the volunteers asked me the time-honoured question: 'Have you been here before?' And I had, but realised it must have been almost 20 years earlier, as I'd been with my ex-husband, who, I recall, was in a mood because he was missing a football match on the telly.

I didn't feel I could count my second visit, which occurred since the cottage underwent its major restoration in 2010-11, as on that second occasion I'd been with the Northerner, and since he'd never been there before and I had, it was only fair he went in for a look around in the limited time we had that day, while I waited outside with our then dog, Ted, and watched the swifts wing up and down the street. (I did get a poem out of my missed visit, though.)

Last summer, when we visited the behemoth that is Wordsworth Grasmere in the Lakes, I found myself longing for the remembered simplicity of Coleridge Cottage and its garden. A re-visit was long overdue.

my favourite too

'You would smile to see my eye rolling up to the ceiling in a lyric fury, and on my knee a Diaper pinned'

While enthusing with the volunteer who welcomed us to the cottage, I'd felt it politic to acknowledge Sara Coleridge, who was left to shoulder the lion's share of the work of running a house and raising the children, while her husband (who surely had ADHD, given the expansive projects he kept dreaming up but never brought to fruition) spent much of his time in Nether Stowey nipping up the end of the garden and sneaking into Thomas Poole's library, going off on long walks with the Wordsworths, and drinking laudanum). I suppose I was hoping to avoid a lecture on The Price Sara Paid, and indeed, the volunteer warned me there was strong feeling in favour of Sara amongst some of her peers.

I think it's perfectly possible to care about both Coleridges. I feel huge empathy for Sara - I too was left alone much of the time to care for four small and decidedly interesting children - but it's also necessary to acknowledge that Samuel was an exceptional poet, one of our greatest (whereas my ex-husband was just off philandering). And maybe STC had to follow where his mind led him in order to produce 'The Ancient Mariner' and  'Kubla Khan', neither of which would have been written in quite the same way without his opium habit and his wanderings through this wild and remote part of Somerset. 

I drew the conclusion many years ago that poets probably shouldn't get married.

The Ancient Mariner

Samuel Coleridge at the age of about 45

This window is engraved with the scenes Samuel and Sara would have seen when they looked through it

At the back of the house, as pre-warned, we were cornered by one of Sara's zealots, who gleefully told us about the time Sara spilt hot milk over Samuel's feet, rendering him unable to go walking with William and Dorothy. (Though of course he did get a poem out of his missed walk.) 

The well

The privy

Papaver Somniferum

Swifts in the garden

After sating ourselves with cottage and garden, Cathy and I headed to our favourite Hood Arms at Kilve for a vegetarian Sunday lunch, which was magnificent but left neither of us with room for dessert or even a cream tea at the nearby Chantry, which was a crying shame. Instead we waddled from the car park to the beach, enjoying the view down to Devon, across to Wales and up the Severn estuary. 

A fine day out. I could make a habit of it.