Booking Through Thursday: Reading Geography

The Booking Through Thursday questions for today are about the settings of books we read.

1. Have you ever wanted to travel to a place described in a book? If the author is good -- and there are so many who are -- every time.
2. Have you ever ACTUALLY travelled to a place because of the way it was described in a book? Where do I get the tickets for Middle Earth? or Victorian England?
3. And if so, did it live up to the expectations, feelings, emotions you expected from the book? Did you feel like Anne was going to come romping around the corner of Green Gables? Was it as if Jo was upstairs at Orchard House, scribbling on a story? Or was it just a museum, or just a city street? Like Abbey Road without the Beatles? The only actual "pilgrimage" I've made so far was to Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, to see the house where Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell grew up, and to Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where Vanessa lived for most of her life -- these were on my first trip to London.  Number 22 was rather different than I'd pictured it, since I'd never seen the rest of the street, and I'd imagined it with the noise of four young children, hackney cabs outside, and so on, but despite the unmistakeable aura of the late 20th century, I was not disappointed.  Charleston was pretty much everything I expected, although rather lonely without its residents and the smell of linseed and turpentine and tea.  And these are both, of course, settings more in the biographical sense, not fictional like Green Gables.  A place I would like to visit someday because of a particular author's novels is Moffat, in Dumfriesshire; D.E. Stevenson lived there for many years.

Photo from Visit Moffat, who although there is no mention of Stevenson, do include a lovely series of walks around the countryside, something very dear to her heart.

Comments

[Bev]

Oh it's a lovely place. I hope that one day you do get to visit. Cheers.

[Laura]

It would be marvelous fun to have a group trip down the Nile... knitting needles included. Though I think something lightweight and cool to knit would be the order of the day. ;-)

The parasol is optional.

[Helen]

I don't share your enthusiasm for DE Stevenson but you might be interested in a short story called 'Beattock for Moffat, by RB Cunninghame-Graham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cunninghame-Graham He didn't write any novels, but produced many short stories, which are well worth reading. If you can't get hold of one of his collections, the story is also in the New Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories, ed. Ian Murray. Beattock was the railway station for Moffat.
You might also be interested to read Lorna Jay's blog http://lornajay.blogspot.com/ She knits and lives about 50 miles away from Moffat.
Of course, you may know all this already...

[Helen (the other one)]

During my insanely Anglophilic teens, I dreamed of visiting the Yorkshire Dales, after reading James Herriot's hilarious, heartwarming books, and seeing the TV series and movies. In 1986, I moved to England for a few years and was lucky enough to visit the glorious, breathtakingly beautiful Dales region, along with countless other places I'd read about and dreamed about from childhood onwards. Places like the Brontes' home in Haworth, Yorkshire...Jane Austen's homes in Chawton and Winchester, Hampshire...Rupert Brooke's holiday haunt at Lulworth Cove in Dorset, and 'his' village of Grantchester, south of Cambridge...Cambridge itself, of course!...and Oxford (Dorothy L. Sayers)...and Bath (Austen and Georgette Heyer)...and from a slightly less-exalted, non-literary source, the charming, surprising village of Plockton in the Highlands of Scotland (just over the sea from Skye), the setting of the TV series "Hamish Macbeth". Last, but definitely not least, there was Stratford-upon-Avon, which to my joy I was able to discover with Jeanne, TWICE. And to my delight, Stratford and all the other places of pilgrimage more than lived up to my hopes and expectations. (But I still haven't been down the Nile on a private, luxury dahabeeyah! Jeanne, do you think David would mind the kids?)