In keeping with my lazy approach to travel, I this week recommend a walk that I haven't actually taken myself, but one day plan to. The Coleridge Way opened earlier this year, and it's a 36-mile trek through the Quantocks in Somerset from the cottage in Nether Stowey where the wild-eyed, slack-jawed, genius opium addict lived at the end of the 18th century, to the coastal town of Porlock.

I understand that the walk is most spectacular, and that there are convivial and modestly priced hostelries selling fine ales en route. Certainly there is great appeal in retracing the steps of our great romantic poets, for it was here that Wordsworth and Coleridge went walking and conceived and wrote the great Lyrical Ballads, a copy of which I would certainly pack in your knapsack if you go on this ramble.

"My walks therefore were almost daily on the top of the Quantock and among its sloping combes," Coleridge wrote later. "With my pencil and memorandum book in hand, I was making studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses."

Walking is the most harmless of idle pursuits, although in their day, Coleridge and Wordsworth's jaunts were seen as suspicious by the authorities. The Home Office described them as a "Sett of violent Democrats" because of their radical views, and sent a spy to watch them. His reports hilariously misinterpreted their rambles as military reconnaissance missions: "They ... were very attentive to the River near them - probably the River coming within a mile or two of Alfoxton from Bridgwater. These people may possibly be under Agents to some principal at Bristol."

Today, you are unlikely to be spied upon and the Coleridge Way looks to be a real treat for both body and mind. I recommend it without hesitation, despite the small fact of not having experienced it directly.

· For the route, look at exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk and, for places to stay, go-exmoor.co.uk.