Doone Valley
Doone Valley is not marled on the Ordnance Survey maps; it is a place with a name invented by literature but of solid reality and beauty, promoted for encouraging visitors, and so becoming a name in reality.
The name 'Doone Valley' refers to the steep-cut valley of the Badgworthy Water, the combes which feed into it and the lands around it. It was the home of the legendary Doones, a family of seventeenth-century outlaws whose legend was brought to the page by R.D. Blackmoore's classic novel "Lorna Doone". Blackmoore was inspired by the wild Exmoor landscape of the valley, which infuses the novel.
Accoording to legend, the Doones lived the deserted medieval village which sat in Hoccombe Combe, a tributary villaey of the Badgworthy valley. Blackmoore's descriptions however more resemble Lank Combe, another tributary valley.
There is a local saying in the Doone Valley: "Culbone, Oare and Stoke Pero, Three parishes no parson’ll go".
The Badgworthy valley with its tributaries is a steep, rocky gorge which one may approach only by precipitous routes on all sides except where it opens to the sea, The Oare valley, which joins the Badgworthy Water, is one of the most wild and romantic corners of Exmoor. In this valley stands the village of Oare, a little place with a somewhat unremarkable church but which draws visitors as this is the church where, in the novel, Lorna Doone married John Ridd, only to fall to a musket ball fired through the window by the dastardly Carver Doone.
Blackmore knew the area well; his grandfather was (notwithstanding the local saying) the Rector of Oare from 1809 to 1842. He knew the Ridd family from which he took the name of his hero; they still live the area.
