We often wonder how many times residents and visitors have walked along a granite kerb beside the path that runs across the park area called the Land of Canaan in Ottery, not realising that every step taken is marking their path along “the longest outdoor poem written on stone in the world."

Ottery St Mary Friends of Phyllis Baxter Action Group writes for the Herald.

A set of 68 poetry stones amounting to 70 metres of an engraved version of Kubla Khan, the poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famous poet born in Ottery in 1772.

The Poetry Stones was an idea developed as part of the Coleridge Memorial Project, although in the words of then campaign organiser John Pilsworth, “the idea for the poetry stones came from Ottery itself."  The group had been trying to create a monument to the town’s celebrated poet “as a focus to promote the town and try and attract people to come to Ottery” and had initially outlined plans for a Coleridge sculpture along with the poem engraving for £100.000.

Considered “the first substantial memorial to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the town”, the project had drawn people to Ottery from the moment of its unveiling in June 2012, but not all had been smooth sailing for those in charge of the project. To ensure they were recognised by their funding agencies as a committed community interest group, local fundraising for the project was essential.

Coleridge Memorial Project had to raise just over £3,000 locally to unlock two grants worth £28,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the ‘Making it Local’ fund, run by East Devon and the Blackdown Hills AONB. Thanks to the support of local residents, Ottery Town Council and others, they smashed their target, raising around £5000 during the summer of 2011. The surplus was used to pay for the information boards we now see at the Land of Canaan.

In addition to the initial fundraising, the group had to demonstrate that the project had to be educational, so leaflets about Coleridge and Ottery St Mary were printed and distributed across Devon. By September 2011, the project looked to have cleared every hurdle until a wrangle over insurance put the funding on hold. The group, in order to be able to receive the £30.000, needed to make sure the project was insured, which meant persuading EDDC to agree to adopt the stones, as they were to sit on council-owned land. Provision for any future repair work had to be created and East Devon District Council as the landowner, needed to take over responsibility for the stones once they have been put in place. Without this agreement the whole project would have been thrown into doubt but a statement from Iain Chubb in October 2011, the cabinet member for the environment at EDDC confirmed they agreed to take over the responsibility for the future repair and maintenance of the stones at the Land of Canaan.

March 2012 arrived and with it the first sets of granite slabs cut for engraving were not accepted by stonemasons Williams and Trigg as suitable. Another batch was requested, which pushed the schedule back enough to scare the group into cancelling the planned April 28 launch. A new date was announced at the end of June in order to meet accounting deadlines imposed by the funding agencies involved.

The aspirations behind the Coleridge Memorial Project members of the poetry stones kick-starting more projects in Ottery to honour the Romantic poet didn’t stop with the unveiling of the Kubla Kahn stones in June 2012. The campaign initiated in November 2009 to establish a memorial to Coleridge in town saw a public consultation exercise in February 2010 and the result after consulting the membership, was to appoint Nicholas Dimbleby as the sculptor for a life-size figure of the poet cast in bronze. The statue has stood since October 2022 in the grounds of St Mary’s Church in Ottery due to Samuel Taylor’s childhood associations with the church and its surroundings, among other reasons.

Phyllis Baxter then Tourist Information Manager was a great supporter of the project and organised every year a special Coleridge weekend in October. The next time you visit the Land of Canaan immerse yourself in the words of a poem considered to be one of, if not the, most famous example of Romanticism in the English language.