Exploring land which inspired evocative tale of romance

Martin Hesp embarks on a pilgrimage to R D Blackmore's Lorna Doone Country

- Martin Hesp

It was 160 years ago that R D Blackmore was writing one of the South West's best known novels. I was mulling over this fact recently while enjoying a bicycle ride in what is now known as 'Lorna Doone Country' and thinking that Richard Doddridge Blackmore must have known the area well, as there are various parts of his long romantic tale that relate strongly to specific parts of the East Lyn complex of rivers and streams.

I say that because he wrote the entire novel from his home 150-miles away at Teddington in Middlesex, so he must have had strong and lasting memories of exploring places like Badgworthy Water when he was a boy.

And, by the way, I realise the first edition wasn't published until 1869, but it's a lengthy novel and it's known that it took him some time to write the 273,000 words. He also experienced difficulty in finding a publisher - a limited three-volume edition of just 500 copies (of which only 300 sold) was produced in 1869, but just a year later it was republished in an inexpensive one-volume edition and became an instant hit. It has never been out of print since.

Having read about R D Blackmore recently and realising it was 160 years since he penned his major work, I decided to go on a little e-bike pilgrimage to Lorna Doone Country with two of my brothers.

And I'm not the only one to have enjoyed diving into Doone Country. Look in the visitor book at Oare Church and you'll find that little Lorna Doone, who never of course existed, has packed the tourists in. From Milwaukee to Manchester, from Tokyo to Tennessee, they come because few names in literature evoke such a romantic sensation of place as that of Lorna Doone.