Former bakery, St Mary Street, Nether Stowey

This house was formerly the bakery. It is probably a very early 18th-century building that has been upgraded later.

Sara Coleridge would have known it well as she had no oven in the cottage and the fireplaces nortoriously smoked. Like many people she brought her roasting and baking to the bakery to be cooked in the ovens still hot after the day's bread had been baked.

Sara's life was a hard one as she coped with a poorly maintained rented cottage, inadequate cooking facilities, mice, infants and endless laundry. She also probably bore the brunt of the hostility the family incurred when they were rumoured to be French spies while her husband slipped out to visit his friends or to walk the Quantocks.