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No this view is not in Devon. But the background of the novel ‘Crossriggs’ by sisters Jane and Mary Findlater intrigues me. The novel is currently being serialised on Radio4; that’s why I decided to post this. The Scottish sisters often co-wrote their novels. Crossriggs is located in a rural village east of Edinburgh in Scotland and may be influenced by the countryside around Prestonpans in East Lothian, where the sisters spent some of their childhood. Their home was HarlawHill House. (Photos were taken a few years ago). “So, the old days at Crossriggs may have been no more interesting than the present – perhaps it is only the distance of years that makes the picture so vivid. Yet surely certain places, certain periods of time are touched with interest independent of the glamour of the past?” The novel was drafted on a table in Paignton Devon, in 1900 after the Findlaters moved to Torbay, ‘charmed by a house whose little courtyard minute garden raised like a balcony, had views of orchards and sea’. The Findlater’s fictional setting of the remembered place far away north was composed from the interior world of their real perception of the new place now before them, as they looked out of their window on the sub-tropical shores of the South West's coast. #Crossriggs #JaneFindlater #MaryFindlater #Findlaters #Devon #Prestonpans #Devonwomenwriters #lostliterarypast #challengingthecanon #harlawhill #womenwriters #novels #fiction #forgottenfiction #BBCRadio4
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There must be so many of us out there at present longing to be elsewhere, not ‘locked’ in one place. My wish to be down in Devon, finding ‘enchantment’ - especially on Dartmoor -made me think of Elizabeth Goudge, whose novel Green Dolphin Country, which she wrote during WWII, when she was living at Marldon near Paignton, made her famous. The novel became a best seller and an MGM film. The story of GDC is set in Guernsey, rather than on the moor or even in Devon, yet I’ve always thought that the plot and setting may have been influenced by Goudge’s Devon surroundings. It’s as though through the peace and serenity of her under moor home she was able to explore the country of her inner world elsewhere, through Marianne, Green Dolphin Country’s heroine. Remembering Goudge in Devon brought home to me that in difficult times like now, we don’t necessarily have to have online images as reminders of special places we’d like to be, but can simply escape in our minds to wherever we want … to our own wild world or ‘Green Dolphin Country’. #ElizabethGoudge #greendolphincountry #Marldon #Dartmoor #Devon #fictioninDevon #escapesinlockdown #womenwriters #findingpeace #novels #wanttobeelsewhere #notinsomerset
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#letwordsspeakforthemselves ‘The prevalence of influenza .. being the same low fever .. is really awful.There is scarce a family ... which has escaped .’ 16 year-old Diarist Emily Shore (born Suffolk) stayed in Exeter from 1836-7 staying at Baring Crescent with her aunt and family. Her journal is packed with richly detailed observations - minutiae of daily life. Journal is online (may have to pay). Photo Wikimedia public domain. #EmilyShore #Devonwomenwriters #diseaseinpast #lostjournals #Exeter ##Exeterhistory #Devon #literaryhistory #womenwriting
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Two Devon houses and a forgotten C16 #Devon writer… well, some of you reading this might dispute one of the houses as being in #Devon, for yes, strictly speaking, #MountEdgcumbe is now in #Cornwall. However, back in the C16, (when Anne Edgcumbe Dowriche was alive and writing her important historical and epic poem ‘The French Historie’), Mount Edgcumbe was in Devon (and Dowriche referred to it as such). Anyway, now I’ve got that straight, the other house I’m posting here -Dowriche House, out in the rural wilds north of #Crediton - is only a handful of crow miles to the north-east and two miles from the village of #Sandford. A drive to Dowriche takes you through labyrinths of narrow and deserted green #Devonshire lanes; each few yards and round each corner you move into the dark depths of wooded hollows, leave behind the hubble-bubble of C21 life and recede into the county’s forgotten past. Born daughter of Sir Richard Edgcumbe, in the mid 1550’s, at either the Edgcumbe estate at Mount Edgcumbe or possible at #Cotehele, Anne Edgcumbe married local clergyman Hugh Dowriche (from the family manor at nearby Dowriche House) and apparently spent the remainder of her life as a non-conformist rector’s wife. The couple brought up at least 5 children and presumably lived at #Lapford and then #Honiton parishes, where Hugh served. … And I have already written far more here about Anne than intended. I must stop, but before doing so, to return to the houses where this began, if you drive to Dowriche House or visit Mount Edgcumbe (or indeed Cotehele) a little bit of detective work (or indeed imagination), can reveal all kinds of fragments of information which in one way or other link up with Dowriche’s life or poem/s. Since I began to research her life and work some years ago I’ve found myself increasingly fascinated by what is out there. Given that Anne lived almost five centuries ago many remnants of her life journey can still be traced… Sadly, as yet no one has been able to find when or where Anne Dowriche died. Perhaps someone out there might decide to do some investigation … #DowricheHouse #MountEdgcumbe #Cotehele #LostDevon #C16Devon #forgottenDevonwriters
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Sometimes the exotic can pop up in the most prosaic places. Princess Caraboo, Devon’s C18/19 wild child celebrity fantasist, impostor, and creator of a silent imaginary language, - which she ‘performed’ rather than wrote on page- made up of strange oriental characters, is a case in point. Baptised Mary Willcocks, and daughter of a cobbler from Stretchdown, a tiny hamlet on the southern edge of Witheridge, Caraboo, as she self-identified, after drifting away from family and Devon, became object of public notoriety. Before she left her home county to join a band of gypsies Mary Willcocks apparently worked for the Moon family, at Bradford Barton, which is I believe just north of Witheridge. History Press has a piece about Caraboo if you’ve interested, at https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-mysterious-princess-caraboo/ One day, when I was on the way to the even more isolated parish of Cheldon to take flowers for my parents’ grave, I decided to locate Stretchdown. Short of stopping at the houses/cottages that are now at the hamlet, to ask permission, it proved difficult to find a suitable spot to take photos, so instead I found a suitable spot looking back across the fields, on one of the nearby Witheridge access roads. Not ideal, but at least the picture points up the contrast between the rural and presumed isolated Devon homelands of this extraordinary girl and the spectacular exploits of her adventures as Caraboo, ‘Princess of the imaginary island of Javasu’ … Actually, Caraboo was just one of a trio of infamous C18/19 literary-linked Devon women … (along with Joanna Southcott and Elizabeth Chudleigh) … Must be something in the air… #Caraboo #PrincessCaraboo #Witheridge #Devon #lostliterarylinks #Devonwriters #Devonwomeninhistory #Stretchdown #BradfordBarton #MaryWillcocksfromWitheridge #lookingbackonDevon’spast #Javasu
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‘And these are yours oh Mountains/these around your Time-Bleached summits mingle in the air’ (Sophie Dixon from ‘Castilian Hours’ 1829). #writingthewild is not a new phenomenon and in the C19 several #Devon women became well-known for their #writings #journals about their travels through the county’s landscapes. Sophie Dixon, who was from #Plymouth or #Tavistock, wrote poetry as well as fiction and kept travelogues about her travels in the county- especially on #Dartmoor and surrounding places. One fan called Dixon’s travel journals a ‘discourse of Dartmoor discovery’. One of these #journals - from which the page in the accompanying picture was taken - was published in 1830 as ‘Ten Days Excursion on the western and northern borders of Dartmoor’. Unfortunately, as yet very little information has been found about Sophie Dixon’s life or family ... #lettingwordsspeakforthemselves #Dartmoordaughters #Devonhistory #Dartmoor #Okehampton #Belstone #womenwritingtheDevonlandscape #Devonwomenwriters #C19journalists #travellinginDevon #SophieDixon
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‘When all alone in some beloved Retreat,/Remote from Noise, from Bus’ness, and from Strife/Those constant curst Attendants of the Great; I freely can with my own Thoughts converse,: And cloath them in ignoble Verse... (From ‘To Clorissa’ by Mary Lady Chudleigh) Place Barton at Higher Ashton in Devon, once home of the proto-feminist C17 poet and essayist Mary Lady Chudleigh, is now, I understand, the exclusive and idyllic wedding venue, called ‘The Great Barn’. The old archway, which when I visited Ashton at least a decade ago, I imagined as one of the still extant features of the site, is probably no longer there. Her writings suggest that the poet loved her pastoral retreat - ‘cool was the place, and quiet as my mind’- in the depths of rural C17 Devon. Can’t imagine what she would make of her home being focus of the hustle and bustle accoutrements of a C21 marriage ... #Devon #Devonwriters #LadyMaryChudleigh #Ashton #PlaceBarton #Womenwritersofthepast #17poets #Findingthepast #lookingforthepast #Devonhistory #writingwomenintothedevonlandscape
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‘I never saw enough but once, an that was on All Soul’s night, under the full moon, but I heard ‘em time an’ again, often in spring where I’d been gathering Kingslips by the stream. I’d wonder where they lay buried.’ (Castle on the Hill, by Goudge). Recently I visited Wells to find the once-home of author Elizabeth Goudge, who’d written some of her most acclaimed novels in Devon, where she’d lived for eleven years. One of them was ‘Castle on the Hill’, said to be inspired by legends of haunted Berry Pomeroy castle. It took a while to locate the two houses - Tower House where Goudge spent the first two years of her life and Rib House just across the road, where the family moved and stayed for nearly a decade. Rib House has a blue plaque for Goudge but situated on the wall outside the property with overhanging ivy, it’s easy to miss. Actually that day, more intriguing than the houses themselves were strange ‘was she a ghost’(?) moments. Wandering in and out the Cathedral’s environs, my path crossed several times with a young girl, of about eight or nine. She seemed solitary. Lost in a world of her own. Not of our time. The first time we passed on the pavement leading to Rib House. Second time she was walking back along the same road leading a dog. Third time, dog had gone; girl was sitting on the wall gazing at the famous Wells Cathedral Clock. It must have just struck midday. The last time I saw her she appeared in front of me as I walked back across the Cathedral Green, idling along and looking from side to side as though taking in everything around her. As I left the Green she was studying the Notice Board. Yes of course the girl was most likely local, and had a home and family nearby. But, afterwards , I remembered that Elizabeth Goudge is known as an author who professed fascination with the extraordinary, the other-life - call it what you will. Totally fanciful I’m sure, but maybe the girl Goudge had returned to watch over her home city (featuring ‘City of Bells’). I’ve begun a poem about the ‘encounter’. It begins ‘You never know when the ghost flips into the tourist crowd’ #Wells #womenwriters #Devon #Somerset #whowasshe? #AllSoul’sDay #thattimeofyear
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‘A woman stood on her back-step, arms folded, waiting’. (Opening of Doris Lessing’s’ Summer Before the Dark). In 1964 Doris Lessing - possibly encouraged by her friend Ted Hughes, who lived only five miles away - bought a Longhouse on the edge of Belstone. In 1968 she converted a shippen, (then still used for horses) into a writing-room, from where she could write and gaze across the paddock northwards to Exmoor. Whilst in Devon Lessing may have been writing ‘Summer Before the Dark’, (pub. 1973) and other books including ‘The Black Madonna’ (1966) and ‘Winter in July’ (1966). #Belstone #Devon #DorisLessing #writers #Dartmoor #Dartmoorwriters #womenwriters #DorisLessing100th #writteninDevon
