A love of nature and freedom motivated writer and artist Hope Bourne to carve out a challenging yet simple, and self-sufficient life in the heart of one of Britain’s wildest landscapes. Known as the ‘wild woman of Exmoor’ she was tiny, little bigger than the hay bale that she could hoist on her back and carry as if it were nothing. One journalist compared her to an Edwardian lady, another said she resembled a deer but such descriptions belied her enormous toughness and strength of character.

Hope was the only child (illegitimate) of a former headmistress. She never met her father, an Australian soldier. Leaving school at fourteen, perhaps because she suffered badly from asthma, she stayed at home with her mother first in Exmoor then north Devon. When Hope was in her thirties her mother died and their house was sold to pay off debts. She was left without a roof over her head and no income, and apart from having worked as a farm hand, no qualifications or training. Initially she spent a year working on an Australian sheep station and then six months in Canada with friends, before returning to Exmoor, the place she loved.

Exmoor is a moorland area and designated National Park that spans parts of west Somerset and north Devon. It is known for its open planes and hills that are green in winter and turn purple and gold with heather and gorse in summer. Named after the river Exe, it is home to the red deer and Exmoor ponies. The region is also known for its spectacular coastal cliffs, deep wooded valleys and fast flowing streams and rivers that make up a rich, wild tapestry.

Hope resided in a succession of remote and primitive cottages, living off the land, shooting for the pot, gathering wood for fuel, and earning a small income helping local farmers tend stock. When the man she loved married someone else, she took off to Shetland for a spell, but returned with a determination to live life on her own terms.

Making a Home

In 1970, when Hope turned fifty, she bought a tiny shepherd’s caravan nestled in the burnt-out ruins of Ferny Ball Farm above Exmoor’s Sherdon Water. In exchange for tending the stock of the farmer landlord, she was given hunting and fishing rights and free rein over the abandoned vegetable garden nearby. She lived here for the next twenty-four years and it became a place she loved like no other.

Her caravan was her ‘little nutshell of life’. She delighted in kitting it out with comforts: a wood fired stove and singing kettle; her winter stores cupboard, and paraffin lamps, patchwork cushions, books, a radio.

This precious place growing into Home, each small thing becoming as another staple in the framework of the whole, each small act binding me to it and it to me…So a home grows, moulded around one, perhaps the most wonderful of all creative achievements.

In her book Wild Harvest (1978) Hope recounts an afternoon of trekking across the moor ‘in the teeth of driving, blinding rain, so hard that it stung like shot and so cold it numbed my face and hands’, with a wind that made it almost impossible to keep her footing on the stony track. As night descended she was filled with relief at the sight of the little bridge and gate to the lane, every step taking her closer to home with its promise of a bright fire, dry clothes, hot supper and tea.

Now I am at the garden gate, now my wet fingers fumble with the door of my tiny dwelling – and I am Home – Amen seven times over!

Shape of her Days

Rising at five every morning, Hope would cook a breakfast of meat and vegetables and a big slab of oatmeal. This was her main meal of the day and while it was cooking she would write. After breakfast she tended the chickens and the farm animals.

So much was crowded into her day: fetching water from the spring and wood for the stove; gardening, hunting, fishing, sketching, walking (ten to twenty miles per day) making things, sawing wood, doing repairs. In the evenings she wrote letters, read and listened to the radio. When needed she helped her farmer friends with lambing, hay-making and the harvest. ‘And some idiot once said to me, ‘What do you do to pass the time?’

Every day, every hour, every moment of every day, its own self and no other, vibrant with life and fraught with decision and drama. Each day a link in the chain of days, stretching from the hidden past into the unguessed future, each my own, my very own in the matrix of being.

Writing

Hope had always kept a journal in which she recorded her observations of the natural world. One day it occurred to her that she could piece together a record of a year in Exmoor to make a book. She sent a selection of entries written in pencil to the publisher Anthony Dent. He returned it as a typed manuscript and came to visit her in person. The result was Living on Exmoor (1963): a month by month account of Hope’s activities, illustrated with her pen and ink drawings.

After A Little History of Exmoor (1968) came Wild Harvest (1978). Also beautifully illustrated, it is the distillation of many years of hard won experience of living sustainably on very little. The book is full of acute observations and practical information. She writes lyrically about the country of Exmoor, its wildlife, weathers and atmospheres.

Wild Harvest was a success. It stimulated interest in her life and Hope reached an even wider audience when she became the subject of a number of documentaries. Her writing and drawing earned her a pittance but helped her to pay for what she could not grow or provide herself.

Provisions

Hope was ahead of her time in many respects, not least her ideas about food. An organic gardener, she used home-made compost to grow leafy greens, and a decent variety of herbs and root vegetables. She had strawberries in summer and apples that would last her from autumn into spring.

A big meat eater, Hope’s idea of a good ration was a pound per day when she could get it, to be eaten at breakfast, straight from the pan. She found it gave her ‘concentrated energy-power unequalled by anything else.’

Nibbling other things, however nice, is not the same as tearing and chewing a chunk of under-done half-bloody red meat.

Of course it had to be wild meat: mature, dark and strong, raised on ‘the tangy herbage of moor and field’. She used her .22 rifle or 12-bore shotgun, and skinned and gutted with her bare hands. Venison was the king of wild meat, then hare, pheasant, grouse, wood pigeon and lastly rabbit of which she was not overly fond. When she could not shoot enough for her needs, she was not averse to the occasional road kill, even if it was slightly on the turn.

For winter Hope bought extra foodstuffs like oatmeal, nuts, brown sugar and dried fruit, in case she became snowed in. She loathed refined, processed and packaged food, ‘devitalised, anaemic’, (especially ‘cotton wool’ bread). Her philosophy was to eat natural fresh food, much of it raw.

Conservation and Philosophy

Hope never bought what she could produce for herself. Her overheads were low and her needs simple: ‘Just a square yard of fertile soil is the most precious thing in the world’, she wrote. In possession of the basic elements of life, she could remain independent and not be ‘starved into submission’.

All around her she saw a sea of waste and it horrified her. She composted her kitchen waste, reused items others would call junk, and collected firewood, using the ash to top-dress her garden. Her clothing was picked up for a few pence at jumble sales.

Of all the things she saved, the most important one in her view was time. From early days she had understood the value of a wealth without money. This self-sufficient life connected to nature, where there was time for creative pursuits, was immensely freeing. She had a radiance that was captured beautifully by her friend, the filmmaker and photographer Chris Chapman, in his documentary (link featured in Weblinks below).

Hope’s knowledge of the region’s flora and fauna was encyclopaedic and she roamed the countryside without a map, relying on her inner compass.

She saw the need to conserve Exmoor, one of the last remaining wild places in England, but she chaffed against its taming, or what she called its ‘suburbanisation’: the widening of footpaths, the cutting back of poisonous bracken, and spoon feeding the public with too many signs and way-marked footpaths. Everything was being done to make the visit easy, which defeated the purpose of a wilderness. People could learn better, she felt, by discovering things for themselves and taking their chances. She was convinced that within the human heart lies a need for risk, adventure and striving.

Take away all danger and all initiative and life becomes a dull grey, like a paintbox whose bright colours have all been mixed and dulled-down to a colourless mess. The brighter the sun the darker the shadows, the darker the shadows the brighter the light. It is ever so.

Contact with the World

Every Friday (except in blizzards) Hope would walk four miles across the moor to the post office in the tiny village of Withypool, her ‘metropolis’. Here she collected her mail and would buy a wholemeal loaf, matches for the stove, cartridges for her guns, paraffin for her lamps and the occasional chocolate bar. She would also send off her thousand word contribution (handwritten in pencil) to the West Somerset Free Press. Her column about life on the moors became popular and generated a lot of correspondence.

The post office was much more than a shop: it was the social hub where news would be exchanged and messages left. En route, Hope would call in on half a dozen households, so by the time she arrived home she had all the local gossip as well as the shopping.

Living in Nature

Whatever happened out on the moors, Hope was on her own. Once in a bad fall she tore a cartilage in her leg and was forced to crawl on all fours to her caravan. There she strapped the leg with a pony harness and survived for three weeks until she was able to walk again.

During a severe winter in the 1970s she was marooned in her caravan for 48 hours by a blizzard. She had to stay awake to keep clearing the area around her door in order to avoid becoming completely entombed. She also dug into waist deep snow to rescue 76 in-lamb ewes and 20 head of cattle. ‘You’ve got to be 100 per cent physically fit to live as I do’, she told the journalist Daniel Farson. ‘You’ve got to be tough, body and soul. Whatever happens at Ferny Ball, I’ve got to cope with it alone.’

There was nothing sentimental about Hope’s love of nature. She had found a great deal of consolation in the life she was able to make for herself but was clear that it had not been ‘some idealistic getaway’ from it all. ‘Living with Nature is very different from looking at it in pictures’, she wrote. ‘Nature in her wonderful web of life is both infinitely beautiful and infinitely cruel.’

She observed how a sheep that had landed on its back would often fall prey to the crow that would peck out its eyes, tear out its tongue, then split the belly and pull out the innards. ‘And if you’ve ever found a sheep like that and still alive, you had to shoot it… well you don’t feel that sentimental about nature’ she told Chris Chapman. Yet all her life nature had her in its grip:

I love the wilderness… I love its space, its defiant freedom, its proud unconquered spirit, its wild and primal beauty, its challenge to the human soul.

Living alone in nature, she had forged a connection with it at the deepest level. She had gradually become aware of ‘the presence, the personality’ of everything around her, and her ‘bond’, and ‘kinship’ with it all. It was an

…awareness that every created thing is intensely itself, whether wild beast, bird or plant, rock or stream, and has being which is fellowship to you.

All Weathers

In Wild Harvest Hope described the fog-bound nights of Exmoor, when mist wrapped the hills and filled the valleys. On a few such nights she encountered a phenomenon known as ‘the Brocken’: the disconcerting appearance of a huge shadowy figure in front of her. It was in fact her own shadow, projected onto the mist by a light source from behind.

The summer nights could be soft and warm with long, green twilights that scarcely darkened before the glow of dawn. Fierce storms and gales would sweep in from the Atlantic, ‘screaming’ across the hills, ‘flaying’ all in their path, the ferocious rains bending her double. And most beautiful of all, according to Hope, were the quiet starlit nights when the ground was ‘crisp with frost’ and the firmament was lit by starlight ‘softer than moonshine’.

In Living on Exmoor she wrote:

How many people see the stars as I do? Not many in this modern world, I think. We have bartered our heritage for too many other things. Our small lives are hemmed about with fetters of our making and our souls caught in a web of our own weaving. Who shall set us free?

Leaving

By 1994 Hope was losing the battle to keep the caravan warm and dry and her advancing years and failing health forced her to come down from the moors into a small rented house at the edge of a village. The move filled her with sadness.

I can’t stand towns. I see all the little houses like little boxes and everything planned out, laid out, safe and ordered – well, there’s no adventure in it, no excitement, no anything.

Hope spurned most of the conveniences of her new home. She rarely used the electricity, slept on the living room floor in front of the open fire, and left the rest of the house to her bantams. She died there in 2010 at the age of 91, surrounded by friends and candlelight.

‘Hope’s legacy lies in her books and her vivid insight into the culture, character and environment of Exmoor’, said Chris Chapman. ‘And in her defence of untamed wild places – places where you can still have adventures and see the dark skies.’

Music

Dulcie is a Dancer, The Wooden Suits

The Wooden Suits are a three piece band who, according to their Facebook  page play ‘rough old folk music from rough old Exmoor’ ‘Dulcie is a Dancer’ is a piece from Exmoor Songs, their first EP, recorded at Steve’s studio, near the cider barn where they rehearse.

Connection

The landscape of Exmoor has inspired poets, writers and artists for hundreds of years. When living nearby, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, together with William’s sister Dorothy, would tramp the length and breadth of Exmoor. They formed such an intensely close bond that Coleridge was moved to write: ‘Tho we were three  persons, it was but one soul.’

In what became known as her Alfoxden Journal (1798) Dorothy recorded her impressions of nature taken on these walks in Exmoor. Both poets drew on these journals for their accurate descriptions of the natural world:

25th January, 1798. – The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to cheque the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a blackblue vault. She sailed along, followed by the multitude of stars, small, and bright and sharp. Their brightness seemed concentrated (half moon).

March 1st, 1798—We rose early. A thick fog obscured the distant prospect entirely, but the shapes of the nearer trees and the dome of the wood dimly seen and dilated. It cleared away between ten and eleven. The shapes of the mist, slowly moving along, exquisitely beautiful.