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Showing posts with the label Devon-History

On the Ways to the Old Literary Roads around Okehampton

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        Okehampton Castle Photo Julie Sampson Writing Women on the Devon Land A-Z of Devon Women Writers & Places On the Ways to the Old Literary Roads around Okehampton          I could have chosen Offwell, Ogwell, Okeford, Otterton, or Ottery St Mary. But for this Alphabet of Devon Women Writers (up to about 1960), I settled on Okehampton. It's partly nostalgia, the town being a favourite place of my childhood, where I (albeit fairly briefly) and before me, both my parents attended school. I don't know of any individual woman author whose home was in the parish up to circa 1960 - but I do know several who included the place in their writings. Rosalind Northcote, Mary Ward and Sophie Dixon all set down in text their personal responses to the scenic, and/or historical characteristic of the Okehampton locality ...      ...  It is not just the romantic lines of Okehampton castle ruin that call, eithe...

Just in Jacobstowe

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At Jacobstowe church Women Writing on the Devon Land A-Zof Devon Women Writers' Places  Just in Jacobstowe Well, for anyone who may previously have stumbled upon this blog and given up bothering to look again, thinking I'd forgotten to update it, here I am - and it is - again. Yes, admittedly I have been preoccupied with other writing projects, but the impasse here, in this A-Z was the letter. 'J' - and the complex deliberations involved as I tried to identify the identity of a certain Saxon lady.       If any of you out there knows of a woman writer back through the centuries (before about 1960) who has lived in or has an important connection with a parish in Devon beginning with J, please let me know!       But then, at the outset I am restricted, given that there is only one 'J' parish. Jacobstowe! I love the parish; before the large family decamped down to Brixham it was the childhood home of my maternal grandmother, ...