We are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood, echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil…
– Mary Webb, Gone to Earth (1917)
The photo above was taken late afternoon in a place that seemed to have come straight out of the Powell/Pressburger film of Gone to Earth, adapted from Mary Webb’s book…
WHISTLES IN THE WIND 
Your blog is such a treat! There’s so much here about stuff I love; Kate Bush, Penelope Farmer, myths, Alan Garner, Hardy, H.E. Bates etc. etc…
In my twenties, I went through a very intense Mary Webb phase… well, such things go into shaping who we are, don’t they… so it’s probably an ever-renewing phase really!
Gone to Earth and Precious Bane absolutely gripped me and spoke so many of the things on my mind when I first read them. The film captures the essence of Gone to Earth so well, I think. Again, the landscape as character…
Lovely photos – full too of that essence that Mary Webb’s novel and the film capture. And what wonderful skies!
Really pleased that you enjoy it!
Mary Webb’s description is incredibly rich and dense (and I found out that Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of it, which is interesting!). Hardy-ish hand of fate too.
Glad that you like the Big Sky…
Yes, I love the unleashed power of her work – all that richness and density and spilling out… like the power of the elements themselves…
It’s a testament, I think, to those links between Mary Webb, Hardy and also D.H. Lawrence that Stella Gibbons wove a bit of all of them into Cold Comfort Farm. It’s fun spotting the allusions! It’s a great read – and a testament in a different way too, really – you know something’s really hit home in the general consciousness when someone writes a parody of it!
I’ve yet to read Cold Comfort Farm properly which is daft because I really like Stella Gibbons – but I have seen a 1968 BBC version which really went for parody in no small way with voiceovers of the descriptive passages. They’re like a great spoof from Private Eye today, she’s incredibly sharp. It doesn’t diminish Mary Webb at all though, like you say, and it’s not dismissive – I think Stella Gibbons is similarly observant of the natural world in her other books, and it’s as much Hardy as Lawrence too, and Gibbon’s whole demeanour as a writer is a million miles from smug superiority.
Love the photos and film clip. I have a copy of Precious Bane which was my mother’s but I have not read Gone To Earth. The Shropshire landscape is beautiful – I walked a bit of Offas’s Dyke a few years ago. I think Mary Webb is ready for a revival.
Thanks – it’s almost a fantastical landscape isn’t it, a kind of wildness that you’d find in old illustrations for Grimm’s Fairy Tales or something.