Why a Booktrail?
1840: Based on real events which occurred in Epping Forest in 1840 where the poet John Clare finds himself trapped inside an asylum
The Quickening Maze
What you need to know before your trail
A fictional yet very real account of when the famous nature poet John Clare is taken into an asylum following years of depression and alcohol dependency. The asylum is a dark and horrible place and for a poet who was so enamored by the very idea of nature, a sense of freedom and the green and rolling countryside, to be locked up here is more than torture.
As the great man falls deeper and deeper into a world of darkness, on the outside, another poet by the name of Tennyson moves nearby. He gets to know the rather strange owner of the asylum, Dr Matthew Allen and begins to get further and further entangled with what he does and what goes on there.
The asylum is called High Beach and the world both inside and out can be a very dark and unusual place indeed.
Travel Guide
High Beach
The High Beach asylum may no longer be a real place within the High Beach area of Essex, close to Epping forest but the remnants of this place, the whispers of the past blowing through the trees are easy to find if you look hard enough. It is the only settlement within Epping Forest, the only place with life both past and present..
For if trees had eyes and ears, the stories they would tell..
It is a true story of how in 1837, the poet John Clare can be be admitted to such a place. He spent four years here in reality where new procedures were carried out in an attempt to study and cure the patients there.
Beech Hill House was the home of Tennyson and the novel suggests he knew the owner and inmates of the asylum well. His brother attended the asylum as well and so he would have really spent quite a bit of time here.
The Asylum
Remember this is 1837 where our understanding and treatment of people with mental illness is thankfully a lot different to what it is now. These people, these so called ‘inmates’ rare prisoners of their minds and of this horrible, brutal place –
He walked through the stone gatehouse into its orderly garden of graves, the thickened silence where the dead lay…
The staff are a mixture of shadows and very real brutal people – not sure which is worse – and the asylum itself is everything wrong with society at the time. John Clare himself shows us his world via his own eyes and it’s via his state of mind that you can either see the place with gritty realism and blackened bricks or as an elegant structure on the edge of the greenery of Epping forest.
Times walls were the strangest prison
An insight into a poet’s torment, a time where mental illness was a curse no-one understood and where the word asylum will send shivers down your spine.
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