Chanters House, Ottery St. Mary.
If you have a spare £7,000,000 lying around, you can own Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s boyhood home, complete with 22,000 volume library.
Alas! Some horrible yob has converted the family chapel into a “party room.”
Country Life story.
The Coleridge family, the previous owners of The Chanters House, had always lived in Devon but the family moved to Ottery St Mary in 1760 when John Coleridge became headmaster of The Kings School. He settled his ‘Tribe’, as he called his four daughters and eight sons, and this was the first of five remarkable generations distinguished by intellectual energy, athletics and good looks. They took the Coleridges high in every profession from the Army to the Law as poets, artists, judges, bishops, and Naval, military and NATO commanders. All were outshone by John’s youngest son, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in 1772, renowned for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He never forgot the landscape of his childhood. The little town, clustering around the church overlooking the broad valley of the river Otter, was to be poignantly recalled most famously in Frost at Midnight.
The entire west wing is taken up at ground floor level by a huge library, the largest west of Salisbury and designed for Lord Coleridge’s 18,000 books.
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