Stars line up to save wild poet’s cottage

Sheerman swung into action, setting up the National Environment and Educational Trust and raising £65,000 in just one week. In October, the trust took possession of the cottage, where Clare was born in 1793, for about £500,000.

Largely uneducated and often penniless, Clare published only four volumes of poetry in his lifetime, each selling fewer copies than the last. He wrote in the open fields around Helpston, inspired by the fenlands and by village rituals, such as planting leeks in thatch to ward off lightning. He also collected folk songs.

“We’re looking forward to finding some manuscripts at the property,” says Sheerman. “He used to write poems and hide them from his mother in cracks in the wall, you know. Then she’d take them out and use them to light the fire.”

It was a battle to buy the cottage — “I thought we were going to lose it,” says Sheerman, “but the head of retail banking at HBOS came through and lent us £450,000 after we’d shown we were credible by raising 10%” — but that was just the start of the trust’s fundraising challenge.

Sheerman’s vision is to fill every one of 750 whitewashed brick niches in the Helpston dovecote with a dove made by a local schoolchild, with one of Clare’s poems attached. Each dove will represent a donation of £500 or more. The cottage will also be decorated with Clare memorabilia. The poet had a library of more than 400 books, including works by Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Crabbe. First, though, an estimated £1.5m must be spent on restoring the property.

The cottage’s fitted louvred cupboards, 1970s bathroom suites and plywood walls will hit the skip, and the building will be stripped back to its oak floorboards, exposed timbers and whitewashed walls. A shoddy extension will be knocked down, leaving the 400-year-old home as it would have looked in the poet’s day.

The property’s services, boiler and a kitchen will all be housed in a building in the garden to free up more space in the house. The attic will become a curator’s home and office.

One key aim of the trust is to use the cottage as an educational resource for children, especially those who have no knowledge of the countryside.

When he lived at Helpston, Clare transplanted flowers from the woods nearby and exchanged seeds and cuttings with his friends, sometimes by post, a practice Sheerman hopes to replicate with a mail-order seed catalogue. Eventually, the trust also wants to set up its own printing press.

“Kids can come here and learn and see something and be stimulated,” says the eager MP. “They can learn about poetry, the economics of landscape change, science and global warming. It will be a centre of excellence. They’ll be able to go on Clare walks and walk the same paths he did.”

Clare moved away from the village in 1832, but constantly returned to his birthplace in his writing. “I’ve left my own old Home of Homes, Green fields, and pleasant place,” he wrote. “The summer, like a stranger comes, I pause — and hardly know her face I miss the heath, its yellow furze, Mole-hills, and rabbit tracks, that lead, Through besom-ling and teasel burrs, That spread a wilderness indeed.”

In 1837, Clare was admitted to High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest, suffering delusions. He briefly returned home, but spent the last 23 years of his life in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. After his death in 1864, his body was returned to his beloved Helpston.

To donate to the trust, send cheques made payable to the John Clare Cottage Appeal to Barry Sheerman MP, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA