It's written on the wind

Lorna Doone, Tarka the Otter and The Water-Babies were all conceived in our wonderful West Country. Clive Aslet loses himself in a landscape of literary inspiration

- Clive Aslet

THOMAS HARDY’S Wessex may have been a land of his imagination, but the topography was far from fictional. So closely was it based on the real countryside that the author annotated a map of Dorset, now in the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester, showing the places from which he drew inspiration. In 1901, the literary critic William Archer recalled a walking tour of this landscape, checking off the sites with Hardy, in an interview for The Pall Mall Magazine.

‘I climbed up to Shaston, in the tracks of Jude and Sue, went on to Sherton Abbas, and met Grace Melbury and Winterborne in Sheep Street: down through the country of the Woodlanders to Casterbridge: on to Budmouth, looking for (but not finding) Overcombe of The Trumpet-Major on the way.’ At which Hardy pointed out: ‘You would have had to turn eastward from the main road.’ His novels are rooted in the earth of his home county and it’s hardly possible to visit south Dorset without seeing it through his eyes.

In his day, R. D. Blackmore was to Devon —where he spent part of his childhood, being educated at Blundell’s, Tiverton— what Hardy was to Dorset, although most of his work has gone out of publication and he is now chiefly remembered for immortalizing Exmoor in Lorna Doone. That novel spawned an entire industry around the Badgworthy Water and Lynton area, where some visitors assume that the lawless Doones are a real family still marauding this wild country and that there really was a shooting in Oare church, where Blackmore’s grandfather was rector. There is a statue of Lorna in Dulverton, gateway to the moor.