– On the Road –

tacking a series of hard climbs into the Mendips, where the earth had become bright red.

It was easy going from Wells, across the Somerset Levels, wondrous and strange and empty, with dykes running across the crest of the land. I couldn’t see the horizon for the cloud. Glastonbury Tor stood above me, overlooking it all. I sailed rather than cycled across the Levels, using the strong winds to tack along the best roads. For a while I watched two ravens harry a buzzard. Pylons all converged on Glastonbury. I skirted Shepton Mallet, and at Chezdoy some dogs chased me, barking through the wind.

One of Thomas’s last stopping points was at Nether Stowey, sometime home of his great hero Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though Coleridge’s cottage was bought by the National Trust in 1909, Thomas couldn’t get inside. Now you’re encouraged to sit by the fire next to which Coleridge wrote ‘Frost at Midnight’ and poke at the embers. It wasn’t an auspicious end to my ride. ‘Nether Stowey offered no temptations to be compared with those of the road leading out of it,’ wrote Thomas, and I tended to agree.

After a while I left and headed back towards Taunton via Cothelstone hill, the summit of the Quantocks, where Thomas had concluded his own ride. It was a stiff climb along a dirt track. A bin overflowed with plastic bags full of dogshit. I sat at the windswept top next to the seven sisters, the rocky foundations of a long-destroyed folly, on a log bench much like that

153