East Coker is a village in Somerset, and also the title of one of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets. His family came from the village, and he was buried in the church.
Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised.
The lanes around the village really are ‘deep’ - steep-sided holloways - and ‘dark’ (shadowed on the sunniest of days). They ‘insist on the direction’ because once you start to walk to walk through one of these sunken lanes, you have to keep following it until you reach the village…