Nature and Place
In 1953 at the age of 35, Bourne’s life changed completely. Her mother died, and she was left without a home, income or job. Bleak as this was, it brought Bourne new freedom, both physical and creative, and she sought a more active, outdoor life.
In 1955 she visited her father’s family in Australia and spent a year on a sheep farm in New South Wales. On her return, friends of her mother lent her a tiny caravan on their farm at Withypool in Somerset.
She observed life on the farm, recording it in words and sketches, and developed a deep interest in the life, landscape and history of Exmoor. Her journals from this time became her first book, Living on Exmoor, published in 1963.
Bourne was fascinated by Exmoor’s sense of wildness and unique spirit of place. For her, it had an animistic, spiritual quality.
Place in itself was a presence. A nook in a combe, with its stream running through it, a grouping of trees, a glimpse of a high sky-line above branches, these presences would coalesce into a greater presence, and I understood the ancients’ perception of genius loci, the sense of a sacred place.
Unpublished memoir, late 1980s.
Bourne recorded her close observations of the natural world using notes and sketches that display a naturalist’s attention to detail and colour. She made thousands of pictures of Exmoor landscapes, often depicting the same view in different seasons, weather or light conditions, which she also recorded in pencil annotations. She sketched outdoors in all weathers, as well as working from memory or photographs.
Small and inadequate though these sketches are, somehow I feel I have in some way brought home a fragment out of life and time and hold it in my hands. Each little picture proclaims that here was a moment in a place and I was there – and still am.
Wild Harvest, 1978.
© The Exmoor Society.
With permission of The Exmoor Society and Halsgrove Publishing.
© The Exmoor Society.
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