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I dreaded walking where there was no path

And pressed with cautious tread the meadow swath

And always turned to look with wary eye

And always feared the owner coming by;

Yet everything about where I had gone

Appeared so beautiful I ventured on

And when I gained the road where all are free

I fancied every stranger frowned at me

And every kinder look appeared to say

‘You’ve been on trespass in your walk today’.

Caution, dread, wary, fear, frown, trespass: words with which any modern walker is all too familiar. But there are signs already that Clare’s mind is troubled way more than it should be by such matters. ‘I fancied every stranger frowned at me’ (even as he walks on the open road) is the key line here: most people he passed by would surely have been wrapped up in their own minds and worlds, scarcely even acknowledging the furtive poet skittering by, muttering to himself. And this is why we remember John Clare today, not just for his lyrical power, but for the delusions and mental decline that eventually sent him to the madhouse.

For someone who never had much to begin with, it was Clare’s extreme sense of loss that defined his life, informed his poetry and ultimately destroyed his sanity. His first-hand witness of the effects of enclosure both confirmed and exacerbated this, but it was by no means a unique example. The lost figure of Mary Joyce, his first love at school, haunts his work throughout. She came from a smarter background than him, so her father forbade any further alliance and, although she remained unmarried in the neighbouring village of Glinton for the rest of her life, it is not believed that they ever spoke again. Even when the sad news of her death in a house fire in 1838 reached him, he continued to think and write of her as his second wife and pine for her by name in poems and diary entries for the rest of his days. She had long since transcended from being a flesh-and-blood Northamptonshire wench into a totem for all that had gone: not just first love, nor the commons and paths, but childhood, innocence, comradeship, freedom, easy sexuality, his status as pin-up of the chattering classes. Family too. John was born a twin, but his sister – a far stronger baby than him – died after a few days. Surprisingly little is made of this in Clare’s numerous biographies, but it must have set in stone the heartbreaking emptiness and perhaps his sense of viewing life from the sidelines that stalked him for ever.

With some irony, if you care to visit Clare’s native country today (and you should), it is its sense of openness that first strikes. Big-sky country, it’s a place of cornfields and cornflowers, poppies and skylarks, languorous clouds, good pubs, woods and furzey commons (at least in early summer, when I was there. Heavy, sodden soils and vicious north-easterly fronts – ‘Flood bellowing rivers and wind roaring woods’ – are its lot come the winter). Church spires are still the tallest things for miles around. Many of the natural (and indeed man-made) features of Clare’s tender verse can still be found, and there are innumerable good paths and open spaces binding them together. Compared with many other rural parts of the country, this seems to be an unsung walkers’ paradise. But then, unlike Clare, we have no intimate knowledge of just how much more free it once was, for we are measuring our sense of its accessibility from a very different base. On top of that, Clare was witnessing the area as it hurtled into the modern age: enclosures, breakneck industrialisation in the limestone quarries and finally the coming of the railways, all events that traumatised him. Now the spent quarries are designated nature reserves, many of the former railways signposted wildlife corridors or cycle paths and, to the amateur eye, the fields look reassuringly timeless. The leisure age has spun its illusion, and we tumble for it. I don’t suppose Clare would have done.

The Soke is a surprising understudy for the Cotswolds.