"Upon The Dovecote's Mossy Slates, ....

.... The pigeons coo around their mates;"

This dovecote next to the cottage where peasant poet John Clare was born is silent now. In Clare's time it was home to a thousand birds, each living in its separate niche. Bred to eat, a delicacy of the rich, not for potmen and ploughboys like Clare.

I took lots of pics in the cottage but I was extremely moved whilst I was in the dovecote. A recording of Clare's,  "I Am", written when he was in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, was playing.

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

I love the last line. My tears were for my mentally troubled forebears, of similar stock to John and for John himself. As a child he was different, preferring to stay at home and read and write instead of going to the green with the other children. It must have been very stressful for a country boy like him to mix with the likes of  depressive opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he was taken to London by his publisher. I'm wondering whether John Clare would now be considered to be on the autistic spectrum?

I was looked after well by the people at the cottage and ditched my plan to go to an exhibition of Clare inspired artist Carry Akroyd's work in Stamford. I bought her book instead and headed out to find Emmonsail's Heath, the subject of one of my favourite Clare poems. The heath is now arable land but gorse bushes remain in the hedgerows. I walked in Clare's footsteps in Castor Hanglands nature reserve and fell flat, "Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread."

I've posted Clare's kitchen in extras.