The magic of Exmoor National Park raises the spirits and inspires the mind. World renowned authors, poets and painters were born here or have come to think, write or paint. Many famous names live in Exmoor National Park. They come to share the tranquility, slower pace of life; old fashioned values and the stunning protected landscape of coast and moor.
Cecil M Alexander, the wife of the Primate of Ireland started writing one of the most uplifting hymns of all time “All things Bright and Beautiful” while staying in Dunster. The purple headed mountain with the river running by, must describe Dunkery Beacon in the late summer when the heather clad moorland is a sea of purple. All creatures great and small are everywhere… then and now.
“Exmoor… All Things Bright and Beautiful”
A young Beatrix Potter also described the quintessential English mediaeval village of Dunster as truly picturesque.
Minehead born Arthur C Clarke’samazing little grey cells must have been switched on when gazing up at the unpolluted skies and starlit nights or when visiting the spectacular landscape of the Valley of the Rocks. Ernest Bevin the politician and founder of the National Health Service was born and went to school in the picturesque village of Winsford, right in the heart of the moor.
Watchet was the inspiration of Coleridge’s Poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”
Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth all came here. The painters list includes Alfred Munnings, Lionel Edwards, Cecil Aldin, Fred Hall, Caruthers-Gould, A. R. Quinton, and Donald Ayres’
The western side of the moor produced “Tarka the Otter” by Henry Williamson. Clovelly was the childhood home of the Victorian author and social reformerCharles Kingsleywho wrote the children’s classic “TheWater Babies”. R D Blackmoor based his famous classic “Lorna Doone” in the Doone Valley…. come and find the water slide. In truth Exmoor National Park is an amazing place that moulds its people to excel.
Non more so, than the launch of the lifeboat “Louisa” when in 1899 during a terrible storm the crew were unable to launch at Lynmouth, so crew and local men, 100 in total, had to widen the rough coastal road, while they and a team of 20 horses hauled the lifeboat 13 miles up the formidable 1 in 4 ½ Countisbury Hill, over the high moor 1,423 feet above sea level, then down Porlock Hill also 1 in 4 to launch at dawn.
The Lynmouth Flood of 1952 when 35 people lost there lives was another occasion when acts of heroism amid terrible destruction came to the fore. Read the full story: Click here