Heatherley

Flora Thompson was born in 1876 at Juniper Hill on the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire border. She is best known as the author of Lark Rise to Candleford, that classic and evocative observation of her rural childhood which has been a best-seller since its publication in 1945. That story ends with her leaving her native Oxfordshire in 1897 for pastures new. In Heatherley she picks up the story again when she takes her first permanent post in Grayshott, a village on the Hampshire/Surrey border. Here she describes her surprise at entering a different world - a new settlement placed amid wild heather-clad hilltops compared with the old-established village set in the heavy, flat, agricultural landscape of her childhood.