Tintern Abbey is a major tourist attraction in southeast Wales. Will and I saw directional signs for it on the highway while driving to Wales from Britain. Tour buses visit. The abbey is a ruin, so I didn’t how much there’d be to see when we went. But, I wanted to go. At university, I’d studied Wordsworth’s famous poem “Tintern Abbey.” What I’d remembered about it, was that he’d visited the abbey with his younger sister and viewed it fresh through her new eyes.

In preparation for the trip, I re-read the poem. It helped that the copy I had was in a book I’d bought years ago second-hand. The original owner had obviously used it as a student. Her scribbled note in the margins deciphered some of the poem’s meaning. Among other things, it’s a religious poem. Wordsworth talks of seeing god in nature and how this sustains him through life’s difficult, depressing and dreary times.

We went to Tintern Abby on a morning that was crystal clear blue. Few other tourists were there. The adjacent town, while focussed on tourism, was attractive, rather than commercial.  Quite a lot of the the abbey’s stonework remains and the site offers details on abbey life.

I’d love to spend a couple of days in Tintern, so I could hike up to a viewpoint overlooking the abbey and see it lit up at night.

Did seeing Tintern Abbey help me better understand Wordsworth’s poem? One thing strikes me now. The poem doesn’t mention the abbey at all, except in the title, the full wording of which is: Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abby, On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1978.

A few miles above … was the poet even viewing the abbey when he composed the poem? His images all relate to nature. I wonder if he used the abbey’s name in the poem’s title to draw a parallel: just as conventionally religious people feel God through religious buidlings, nature was Wordsworth’s church.

In Wales, we stayed near Hay-on-Wye Hay-on-Wye (pop. approx. 1,500). Sometimes called “town of books”, Hay-on-Wye has over 30 second-hand bookstores and hosts an annual international literary festival.

We were in southern Wales to hike and only made it into Hay twice, both times toward the end of the day after most of the bookstores had closed. Too bad. I could have spent hours browsing the varied shops, some general, others specializing in genres like detective fiction, natural history, maps and out-of-print childrens’ literature.

While many of the stores are in traditional buildings along the town’s main streets, the two I browsed were open-air style. Books filled shelves, protected from rain by an overhang. No one manned these stores. You simply took the book you wanted and dropped the appropriate coins into a box. The books were randomly ordered. You had to comb through old textbooks and others of minor appeal to find a classic novel or recent bestseller. This gave the store a rummage sale flavour and the prices were rummage sale, as well – about 75 cents to $2.00 per book. It wouldn’t surprise me if second-hand dealers from the rest of Britain and Ireland make regular trips to Hay-on-Wye for good deals they can sell at a markup.

My quick search of the stores’ shelves unearthed John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. I bought it to read for the rest of the trip and thoroughly enjoyed it.

On second thought, it’s probably good that I didn’t have too much shopping time in Hay-on-Wye. How would I have fit all the books I’d have wanted to buy into my suitcases?

My sister was named for the title character in R. D. Blackmore’s classic novel, Lorna Doone. For that reason, when Will and I were in Exmoor National Park this fall, I was eager to drive through Doone Country, which inspired the story.

That is, I was eager for Will to drive. This was our second day of car travel in England and I was finding it scary enough to be a passenger. Even Will, normally a confident driver, was stressed by having to drive on the left-hand side of those narrow country roads hemmed in by hedges with no shoulders.

Lorna Doone tells the tale of a family of robbers and cuthroats named Doone, who pillage and attack the peaceful villagers and farmers living near Doone Valley. The murderous leader of Doones kills the father of the novel’s narrator and hero, John. One day, John wanders into Doone Valley and meets Lorna, the niece of the robber leader. Despite her upbringing, Lorna is gentle and good and, of course, beautiful. John and Lorna fall in love, but must meet in secret. I don’t know what happens next. I tried to read the book when I was a child, but, despite the story’s dramatic appeal, couldn’t get through the dense, old-fashioned prose.

The turnoff into Doone Valley from the main road was poorly marked. We overshot it, but doubled back and found ourselves winding down the narrowest and steepest road in England that we had encountered so far. Sections with overhanging trees added “Doone-ish” atmosphere.

The whole time down, we prayed we wouldn’t encounter an approaching car. Whenever we did, one of us had to back up to the nearest road widening and squeeze tightly to the hedge to let the other vehicle could pass. We feared the hedge or passing vehicle would rip off one of our side mirrors.

In short, our feelings echoed the terror of the locals in Lorna Doone when they ventured  through the wicked Doone Valley. It was like a theme park ride.

With great caution, we edged our car across Robber’s Bridge without scraping the sides on the stone walls, continued on the road and crossed the second, equally narrow bridge to Malmstead, which consisted of a gift shop, cafe and campground. From Malmsmead, hiking trails set off along the river and up the hills dotted with sheep.

We learned there was an easier, but very steep road, out from the other direction. We drove it up to the plateau and were out of Doone Valley.

The visit has inspired me to give the novel another chance. We survived Doone Valley. After that drive, Lorna Doone’s archaic prose should be a breeze.

Will and I arrived at  Coleridge Cottage jet-lagged and exhausted from our sleepless night on the plane from Calgary to Gatwick, England. To rest up from the trip, we spent the first two nights in the Somerset countryside en route to Wales.  A visit to a nearby home once occupied by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge seemed a simple activity for our first day.

Like most of our generation, Will and I had both studied Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in school.  I’d also taken a course in Romantic Poetry at university and  was so smitten by Colerdige’s poem Kubla Khan that I still recall many lines by heart.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sacred sea.

Okay, according to Wikipedia I got the last line wrong. It’s sunless sea. Was that a Freudian slip?

My university professor portrayed Colerdige as eccentric, largely due to an opium addiction. He told us Coleridge once published a poem previously published by a fellow poet and claimed it as his own work.  This wasn’t an attempt at plagarism; Coleridge was too out-of-it to know what he was doing.

In 1797, when Coleridge went into debt, a patron/friend offered him the small cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset.

Coleridge moved into the then five-room house with his wife and son.  To save money, they grew their own vegetables and fruits in the generous back yard, which you can still wander through. My guess is that Sara Coleridge did all the farm work, while her husband went for long walks in the hills, wrote poems and entertained friends, including fellow poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy.

Tragedy struck when a second son died as a result of a rubella vaccine. Coleridge left Sara to deal with her grief alone while he travelled to Europe. The family moved out of the cottage after three years, taking their furnishings with them. The British Naitonal Trust has refurnished the cottage with period pieces like ones the Coleridges might have had at the time. As you go through the house, volunteers answer questions and fill you in on the details of Coleridge’s life. Upstairs, there’s a reading room with a collection of his works you can read or listen to on audio sets and a hands-on room where you find out what it’s like to write with quill pen (not easy).  After my tour, I enjoyed my first pot of tea in Britain at the museum cafe.  I might have had a beer at the Ancient Mariner pub across the street, if I wasn’t worried the drink would put me to sleep.

Coleridge’s short stay at the cottage was a productive time. During these three years, he created some of his most famous works, including Kubla Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The only line I remember from the latter poem is one usurped by Nestle for a 1960’s T.V. commercial.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop of Quik.