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SOMERSET Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner was already an established novelist and poet when she agreed to write Somerset in 1949. The result is a witty and erudite companion: ‘a sensualist’s book, written in a style which conveys the intimate quality of conversation.’ With Warner as a guide the reader is taken on a journey through the county’s most beautiful scenery – ‘One cannot travel through Somerset without feeling that one is being handed on from one set of hills to another.’ Exmoor, Quantocks, Poldens or Mendips, they each have their own distinct character enriched by the colour and texture of stone which has shaped their architectural heritage.
Bath and Wells and the great Ham stone houses are among the highlights but Warner is just as good on Somerset churches, its barns and cottages and the craftsmen who built them. She has a particular affinity for the willowy landscape of Sedgemoor and Glastonbury’s legendary Tor and is equally at home with the Romantic poets on the Quantocks. But as she admits, ‘Since I am constitutionally incapable of resembling a guide, an err-and-stray-book would be nearer my measure.’ She lingers in country lanes, muses on the natural world and is always alive to the sounds and smells and colours of the countryside. Her Somerset is packed with fascinating information and delightful digression. Just as the first edition of Somerset in the Vision of England series was a collaborative affair between author and artist so this brand new edition is illustrated with a selection of stunning black and white photos by several eminent photographers who have worked in the county. Edwin Smith’s images, which first appeared in a Thames & Hudson series on English architecture in the early 1950s are reproduced alongside more recent work by Patrick Sutherland on the Somerset Levels (Wetlands 1986) and Chris Willoughby whose Somerset (1993) was part of the Photographers’ Britain series. |
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Somerset |
