Lord Tennyson

The green hills and walking country of the Lincolnshire Wolds still breathe the 'calm and deep peace’ which inspired Alfred - later Lord - Tennyson as a boy, and it's easy to understand that for the lad who grew up to succeed William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, poetry and the great outdoors were natural companions: ‘For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.’ 

Born in Somersby in 1809, Alfred spent hours exploring the local fields, playing on sand dunes at Mablethorpe and reciting poems with his siblings. There's a bust of Somersby's famous son in St Mary's Church, or seek out the stream at the west end of the village, the alleged model for his English idyll, The Brook. A national cycle route runs through the Lincolnshire Wolds. 

In 1835 Tennyson stayed at Mirehouse on the shores of Bassenthwaite in the Lake District, and scenes around the lake near the Church of St Bega may well have inspired the setting for the closing scene of Idylls of the King, when Sir Bedivere carries the wounded Arthur ‘to a chapel nigh the field’. The Coast to Coast Cycle Path runs nearby.  

Later, North Cornwall provided a powerful impetus to his work, too. His 1848 tour to research Arthurian legends for his Idylls of the King took him along Morwenstow's cliffs, to Bude, Tintagel's romantic ruins and the rocky Lizard, where he watched ‘glorious grass-green monsters of waves’. The Atlantic rollers nowadays make North Cornwall an exhilarating centre for Europe's surf scene, and national cycle routes run along the coast including the Bristol to Padstow route.  

From 1853, Tennyson made his home - now a hotel - at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, off the Hampshire coast, ‘Where far from noise and smoke of town, I watch the twilight falling brown’. He wrote Crossing the Bar on a voyage between the mainland and his home. Walkers adore the island's compact yet varied scenery: Tennyson Down was named in the poet's honour and you can share his best-loved stroll along the chalk clifftops towards The Needles rock formation. Or sample the 60-mile (97 km) Isle of Wight Coastal Path.

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