The famous book captures a long-gone Exmoor, but there’s still a feeling of wilderness out on the open moor.
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.
この記事は Country Life UK の May 01, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の May 01, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds