More Poets and Writers Inspired by Exmoor

MORE POETS and WRITERS inspired by Exmoor

Although Exmoor will forever be associated with Lorna Doone, many others works of literature have been inspired by the moor. R D Blackmore himself wrote other stories including The Maid of Sker (1872), which includes in Parson Chowne the vicar of Molland and Knowstone Mr Froude, a man notorious for bad temper who died in 1853 in a fit of rage and is buried in Knowstone churchyard.

Richard Jefferies (d. 1887), writer and mystic, wrote Red Deer (1884) after a visit to Exmoor, mainly inspired by the Heal family of huntsmen. He was a supporter of agricultural labourers and a prolific writer on rural affairs. His friendship with the artist John William North took him across the Brendons to Combe Sydenham and to the Exmoor coast, walking from Bicknoller to Dunster and Selworthy. On a visit to Tarr Steps the two men ate clotted cream and whortleberry jam at a nearby cottage. Jefferies noted on his return through Dulverton the labourers going home with tree branches for the family hearth across their shoulders. As well as providing one of the best accounts of the red deer he observed Exmoor life including whortleberry picking, still a popular custom although no longer producing ‘tons and tons – whole truck loads – sent away by railroad’. His walks inspired Summer in Somerset, published just after his death and illustrated by drawings made by North in 1883. When North discovered that his friend’s widow was destitute he organised a fund for Mrs Jefferies.

Red Deer went through several editions although not as many as Sir John Fortescue’s The Story of a Red Deer (1897) written for children, which was popular enough to merit another facsimile edition in 2003.

Although not usually associated directly with Exmoor, the Waugh family have lived on the fringes of Exmoor for much of the 20th century. The journalist Auberon Waugh (d. 2001) was born at Pixton Park, Dulverton in 1839, eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh who had married into the Herbert family.

Hope Bourne, author of Living on Exmoor and a painter, lived for many years at Higher Blackland farm, Withypool.[1]

Exmoor has, and still does, inspire many to poetry. Elihu Burritt in his autobiography A Walk to Lands End and Back (1864) thought Exmoor the most romantic place he ever saw. Although she was not thinking of Exmoor Mary Webb’s vision of the moorland poet was true of many.

He wrapped himself in the moor and he attained a beauty he could not have won in a town. Little by little he made his poem – rugged sweet and wild –and when he sat alone by the fire in the evenings he was comforted by the unifying of himself with the beauty of the earth, by the …. mysterious mingling of his soul with the sweeping dark expanses with their grey roofing cloud.

Not all attain to the stature of Coleridge and Tennyson. The latter while on a visit to the Carnarvon Arms near Dulverton referred to Exmoor as a land of bubbling streams.

Francis Tilney Basett, vicar of Dulverton in the 19th century was a great theologian reputed to spend eight hours a day working in his library. He was also a poet and wrote 12 poems inspired by the area, which he published as Dulverton Musings in 1874. One of his poems, Dulverton from Mount Sydenham, includes the lines:

How unimpassioned must he be,

who can behold thee heedlessly

can drink with unadmiring eye

Thy luscious flood of scenery.

Walter Raymond was the son of a Yeovil glover who retired from business in 1892 and became a writer. His books like Two Men o Mendip and The Book of Simple Delights are studies of rural life. By 1910 he had moved to Withypool and kept open house in his cottage. He like to visit the nearby inn, where Blackmore is said to have written much of Lorna Doone, to collect stories and learn dialect. He wrote several books on the life of they country people around him.

Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, spent much time on the north-west of Exmoor and his book Goodbye West Country (1937) tells of his sorrow in leaving the area.

Another 20th-century writer was Llewelyn Powys (d. 1939), younger brother of the better-known John Cowper Powys. Llewelyn’s Somerset Essays (1937) include an account of a summer fishing holiday on Exmoor c. 1900. His description of his first night on Exmoor is very evocative of farm life at the time.

A deep dish of Devonshire cream, and a loaf of brown bead with lightly boiled fresh eggs, were set before us on a lamp-lit, tea-laid table in a room smelling of the peat fire glowing red on the open hearth: indeed, the smell of burning peat permeated the whole room-the curtains smelt of it, the Devonshire cream tasted of it.

Teacher and writer Berta Lawrence is perhaps best remembered for her articles and books on the social history of the Brendons and Quantocks. She also took an interest in the artists of west Somerset and wrote a lively article for the Exmoor review on John William North, painter of Exford, Halsway on the Quantocks and several parts of the Brendons. She was also a poet and Exmoor inspired poems such as Nativity, Exmoor imagining a child born in a wattle hut on Exmoor when Christ was born. She also wrote a poem on Ash Farm in Culbone where Coleridge is said to have started Kubla Khan. One of her best poems is probably the ‘Deserted Village’ about Clicket, between Timberscombe and Luxborough. The opening words of the poem could apply to any of Exmoor’s abandoned settlements.

Dead now, old people who remembered.[2]

Many have been inspired to write the history of Exmoor but few on the scale of E T MacDermot’s A History of the Forest of Exmoor (1911) and Charles Stewart Orwin’s Reclamation of Exmoor Forest (1929) to which all later historians owe a debt of gratitude. MacDermot was a lawyer by training and discovered the Public Record Office during his legal career and the early records of Exmoor. He spent his later life at Lillycombe near Oare and produced his other great work The History of the Great Western Railway, which was published between 1927 and 1931. Orwin was an agricultural writer and historian perhaps best known for his study of The Open Field (1938).

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Mary Suirat Page 4 Exmoor Reference

[1] See article under Withypool Village.

[2] Bonham-Carter, V, Exmoor Writers and their Works (Dulverton, 1987), passim.