It seems the very strategy that enabled Lorna Doone to be imported into the landscape and detached from the author has been the text’s undoing, as it has decayed back into history in popular memory. The gift-shops may sell ‘Lorna Doone’ biscuits, thimbles, and coasters, but there is hardly an edition of the book itself to be had.
There is still a Lorna Doone hotel in Porlock, the girl behind the bar, as I discovered upon asking, has very little idea of the reason behind its name. He then brought the whole to life with striking descriptions of landscape, almost pre-Raphaelite in intensity. Blackmore combined this material with the tradition of John Ridd, a giant among local men the story of a local highwayman, Tom Faggus and the tale of the Monmouth rebellion. In Lorna Doone, Blackmore drew upon a fund of local legend, anecdote, and historical titbit detailing the story of the seventeenth-century Doones, a clan of aristocrats who, outlawed and landless, took up residence in a remote Exmoor valley and terrorised and robbed the natives until they were eventually cleared out by government forces. Blackmore’s novel used to be a set text in schools, was still a children’s classic in my day, and is periodically revived as costume-drama, but all the same these days ‘Lorna Doone’ country has faded in much the same fashion as the territory of The Lady of the Lake – the topic of my last post.
But the late eighteenth century also saw the birth of the desire to follow in the footsteps of literary characters into a real landscape, as in the case of Loch Katrine or indeed Exmoor, that is, if you have read Lorna Doone (1869), and this is today’s adventure. Rousseau’s descriptions of his walks in his Rêveries on an island in the Lac de Bienne in Switzerland brought all sorts of visitors keen to mimic his state of mind William Cowper’s walks around Olney, lovingly described in his poem The Task also prompted admirers to put on their boots and follow his path.
Since at least the 1790s, when writers began to describe their favourite walks, visitors have retraced them. Walking ‘in the footsteps of’ a famous author has long been a favourite past-time – and not just one of mine.
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