Hope Bourne's Exmoor Village

Book excerpt: For half of her lifetime, Hope lived in and around the village of Withypool on the southern side of the Moor. In the late 1960s, at a time of great personal unhappiness, she sought increasing solace in her friends, neighbours and the landscape around her. Finding her daily business restricted to Withypool and its environs, she set about writing a tribute to the place. She recounts a time before mobile phones and the internet had come to dominate daily life, when communication was a gossip over a half-open stable door and wireless meant the radio. She takes the reader around the village, along the river and out again around the parish boundaries, describing people, local events, farms and the changing landscape.