Love's Cold Returning
- Bridget Somekh
- Feb 20
- 3 min read
Updated: May 1
In 2015, Ellis Hall and I began work on a slim volume of photos and poems about the poet John Clare’s escape in 1841 from a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, and his three-day walk to his home in Northamptonshire without maps or food or suitable clothes. This developed into a five-year project researching what remains of where he walked—as far as we could infer his route from his 1,500-word account known as the 'Journey out of Essex'.
Over three years, we made trips to what remains of the paths and roads he travelled, researching the history of the places and the buildings he passed by. At first, I focused entirely on writing poems, as if catching sight of him along the way and imagining how he might have responded to what he saw. I called these untitled poems 'Musings'. I also wrote some longer poems, including a myth about Clare’s survival at birth under the protection of the Fiend of the Fen (who snatched away his twin sister instead). Later, I joined Ellis in writing the first draft of two extended sections of the prose narrative.
We met many wonderful people who supported us: local historians, members of Cambridge University's Centre for John Clare Studies, and friends at the gatherings of the John Clare Society's Festival, held annually on his birthday.
Love’s Cold Returning was published in 2019 by Thirteen Eighty One Press.
Clare's Odyssey
In July 1841, labouring-class poet John Clare escaped from High Beach Asylum in Essex and embarked on an extraordinary journey home to Northborough, Northamptonshire, covering over 80 miles on foot. Clare, who had been committed due to his declining mental health, rejected the institution’s confinement and set out alone, navigating the English countryside with little more than instinct and memory.
His journey was arduous, lasting four days, during which he walked without a map, relying on his deep familiarity with rural landscapes. He survived by eating grass and drinking water from ditches. His mind oscillated between moments of lucidity and delusion, as he imagined himself married to both his actual wife, Patty, and his lost love, Mary Joyce, whom he believed to be alive despite her death three years earlier. Along the way, he met farmers, labourers and gipsies, engaging them in conversations that reflected both his poetic sensibility and disturbed state of mind.
Tramping the dusty highways and sleeping rough, he traversed forest, field and heathland only to arrive at a home which, in his deluded state, he did not recognise. His wife Patty tried to take care of him, but his mental struggles persisted. Though he experienced moments of clarity, his delusions remained, and he was eventually recommitted to Northampton Public Asylum, where he spent the rest of his life.
The evening of his arrival, he wrote the Journey out of Essex, an account of his experiences on the road. Sometimes dreamlike, occasionally lucid, often rambling, but always deeply moving, this prose piece chronicles a mind in turmoil as much as the ever-changing landscape through which he passed. Using it as a guide, Bridget and Ellis retrace Clare's walk in prose, poetry and images, while shedding light on the world in which it took place and seeking out the remains of that world in the twenty-first century.
Praise for Love's Cold Returning
"Twinned and interweaving voices lead us back, once more, to venture in the traces of one of the great English literary journeys. Here, mapped and illustrated, is a scrupulous and perhaps definitive reckoning with the specifics of the written road. A lively and sympathetic account that tests and refines all previous myths and theories. A labour of love."
— Iain Sinclair
"'Love’s Cold Returning' is Ellis Hall and Bridget Somekh’s account of Clare’s physical and mental journey from the asylum back to his cottage. Retracing his footsteps and surmising his likeliest route, they have produced a lively narrative of the places he encountered. Their writing, punctuated by maps, drawings and Hall’s high-quality photographs, is pitched somewhere between travelogue and detective novel. A sensitive portrait of Clare emerges from this grassroots approach, along with an unexpectedly granular record of England’s changing landscape. Readers will learn an enormous amount, and Clare enthusiasts will appreciate the equal measures of passion and factual precision that Hall and Somekh pour into their hybrid, multifaceted book."
— Erica McAlpine, TLS