The Coleridge Steps

An afternoon of garden tidying. I rebuilt the wretched strimmer-thing to cut the grass. The challenge of living as artists is to bring creativity to as many aspects of life as possible, not to keep 'creativity' for the working days. So I applied this to cutting the grass, and shaved the grass along the edge of the garden steps but left the bulk of the grass there long and shaggy. I don't like suburban formality in a country garden; we have lots of grass but it is patchy and uneven and will never resemble a neat lawn. (Over the summer I left a small corner to grow as wild as it could, and the grass reverted to a form of wild-wheat, with long golden stems and seedheads. And on rare warm evenings the light through the grass was lovely.)

The garden steps are a part of the oldest architecture of house and garden. The steps lead down from the late eighteenth-century toll road to the old front door of the house, which used to be a dairy. So the steps could be built and rebuilt over two hundred and thirty years. They are on the south side of the house but under a thick hedge and the steep hill, so get a bit overgrown. I attacked the grass, but left the moss and lichens growing on the mudstone walls and the ferns growing in the steps itself. In the rain, the stones and moss and ferns remind me of the Lake District and stories of Coleridge's unexpected arrival/departure from Grasmere; with my work on Wordsworth's time in this area I imagine Coleridge leaping enthusiastically up the steps to catch a lift on the road and disappear for months. There is also the possibility that Wordsworth - travelling into Presteigne in the 1820s - could have come along this road and seen the cottage/dairy, and so the steps. I will try and take a picture soon.