Bookish trails Blyton, Dickens, Hawking and Lewis
Enid Blyton wrote hundreds of books, and we read them in our millions...
HOW MANY OF us learnt to love to read with Blyton’s books? The Magic Faraway Tree, Malory Towers,
The Secret Seven, Noddy and, of course, The Famous Five which started with the Treasure Island mystery in 1942. Blyton holidayed three times a year to Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck, and the atmospheric ruins of Corfe Castle are thought to be the model for Kirrin Castle, where Julian, Dick, George, Ann, and Timmy the dog, have numerous adventures.
Pack up a picnic – with lashings of ginger beer – and you can hike south-west to Kimmeridge Bay, ‘where rocks jutted up from the beach, surrounded by limpid rock pools’ in Five Fall into Adventure. Or north-west of Corfe Castle lies the Blue Pool – the ‘enormous blue lake that lay glittering in the August sunshine’ of Five Go Off in a Caravan, and a mile further along the Purbeck Trail, Stoborough Heath is the Mystery Moor of book 13. Blyton was incredibly prolific, writing up to 50 books a year and selling over 600 million copies, although the BBC long refused to broadcast any, saying they lacked literary merit, and her books have been banned from many libraries for their prejudiced views. In 2016, the Royal Mint considered Blyton for the 50p coin, but she was rejected as ‘a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer’. English Heritage, discussing the blue plaque on her home in Chessington added: ‘Others have argued that while these charges can’t be dismissed, her work still played a vital role in encouraging a generation of children to read.’
WALK HERE: Download Corfe Castle at walk1000miles.co.uk/bonusroutes
Probably the most popular science book ever written, selling over 25 million copies and staying on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. Hawking was born in Oxford, where he also got his degree, but he’s more closely associated with Cambridge where he studied and worked from his cosmology graduate course onwards. The university city in the Fens is a fascinating place to explore – passing Trinity Hall where he first studied, and Gonville & Caius College where he then became a research fellow – but to begin to ponder the vast universe the book investigates, it’s best to go out at night, when your view can roam light years up to the stars Hawking teaches us about, and if it’s dark enough, to the Milky Way too.
WALK HERE: Download a Cambridge walk at walk1000miles.co.uk/bonusroutes or step out from your door after dark and wonder at the universe.