In The Footsteps Of Lorna Doone

The famous book captures a long-gone Exmoor, but there’s still a feeling of wilderness out on the open moor.

- Fiona Reynolds

This year marks 150 years since one of England’s most famous stories was published. Evoking a wild, untrammelled landscape dominated by the marauding Doone family, Lorna Doone made its author R. D. Blackmore famous and Exmoor immortal.

Books about places are enduringly popular. Dickens evokes London, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Warwickshire and Thomas Hardy will always make us think of Dorset. Today’s authors are no less place-based: think of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane or Ian MacEwen’s On Chesil Beach, whose narratives owe as much to place as to people.

Lorna Doone, however, does something more. It captures a long-gone Exmoor and makes us think about change. Imagine a landscape in which the roads run out at Porlock and the moors are impenetrable and hostile even before the merciless Doone family is factored in.

The narrator, John Ridd (his father is killed by Doone raiders as the book opens), describes the contrast between the peaceable lower reaches of the River Lynn and the fearsome, thickly wooded Badgeworthy (pronounced ‘Badgery’) valley, where he first encounters the beautiful child, Lorna, who is to occupy his dreams.