Had it not been for the ‘person on business from Porlock’ that interrupted Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s composition of his great poem ‘Kubla Khan’, perhaps very few outside Somerset would ever have heard of the historic little village of Porlock, nestled in a hollow below Exmoor National Park. This is an injustice that local historian Dennis Corner has spent much of his life putting right, having written several books of local history celebrating the fascinating story of this coastal hamlet deep in Lorna Doone country.
The result is a fascinatingly detailed portrait that guides us from the very origins of ‘Portloc’ – the ‘locked port’ – that dates to the Middle Ages. ‘We do not know by what name it was known earlier,’ writes Corner, ‘or even if there was a settlement here before Saxon times.’ The author takes us on a tour and history lesson, explaining some of the linguistic and cultural connections with neighbouring South Wales across the Bristol Channel, as well as showing us the lime kilns and tan yards that provide so many clues about the region’s industrial background.
Porlock in Those Days
Published by Rare Books and Berry
Hardback
96pp
ISBN: 978-0-9557119-8-5
Price £12-95
Available from all good bookshops or
Direct from the publisher (£12-95 plus £1-63 post)
Published 1st November 2009
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Had it not been for the ‘person on business from Porlock’ that interrupted Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s composition of his great poem ‘Kubla Khan’, perhaps very few outside Somerset would ever have heard of the historic little village of Porlock, nestled in a hollow below Exmoor National Park. This is an injustice that local historian Dennis Corner has spent much of his life putting right, having written several books of local history celebrating the fascinating story of this coastal hamlet deep in Lorna Doone country.