Elizabeth Goudge’s writing life was shaped as much by place as by imagination, and nowhere left a deeper mark on her work than the years she spent in Marldon. By the time she arrived in the village in 1939, she had already published several novels and established herself as a writer of unusual sensitivity, but it was in the quiet lanes and wooded valleys of South Devon that her voice settled into the form readers now recognise. She came to Marldon in the aftermath of her father’s death, exhausted by grief and by the strain of caring for her mother, and the move was intended as a temporary refuge. The bungalow they rented, known locally as the Ark, stood on a slope above the Westerland valley, and the view from its windows — orchards, hedgerows, and the soft folds of the land — struck her with a force she later struggled to explain. She wrote that she had “never felt so deeply rooted anywhere,” as though she had stumbled not into a new landscape but into one she had somehow always known.
The war broke out while they were still living in the Ark, and the family’s London relatives asked to buy their Hampshire home as a place of safety. Elizabeth and her mother, unwilling to return to Oxford and unable to face the memories attached to their old life, decided to remain in Devon. Their finances were modest, but by a stroke of luck they met a builder who had known them in Wells and who offered to construct a small bungalow for them on the edge of a wooded valley near Cockington. This became Providence Cottage, the house where Elizabeth would write some of her most enduring books. The cottage, with its orchard, its sloping garden, and its sense of enclosure, provided the stability she needed to work, and the surrounding countryside offered a richness of imagery that fed directly into her fiction.
Her Marldon years were extraordinarily productive. In the decade she lived there she wrote ten novels, including Green Dolphin Country, which became a major MGM film, and The Little White Horse, which won the Carnegie Medal and remains one of her most beloved works. She also wrote Castle on the Hill, a wartime novel steeped in the atmosphere of Devon, and Henrietta’s House, the sequel to City of Bells, which carries the imprint of the valley around Westerland. The Eliot trilogy began here with The Bird in the Tree, a book whose themes of family, rootedness, and moral choice reflect the stability she found in the village. Even her children’s stories from this period — Smokey House, Make Believe, The Valley of Song — carry the unmistakable scent of Devon lanes and the quiet, luminous quality of the countryside she loved.
The Eliot trilogy did not all originate in her Marldon years. Only the first volume, The Bird in the Tree, was written while she lived in the village, its themes of family, duty, and rootedness reflecting the stability she found there. The second book, Pilgrim’s Inn (also published as The Herb of Grace), was written after she left Marldon, during her Oxfordshire period, and reflects the post‑war need for healing and renewal. The final volume, The Heart of the Family, was written still later, in Hampshire, drawing together the trilogy’s themes as new characters seek purpose and reconciliation at Damerosehay. Though only its beginning belongs to Marldon, the trilogy as a whole remains one of her most sustained explorations of duty, love, and the shaping force of place.
Marldon did more than provide scenery; it gave her a way of seeing. The war brought American troops into the valley, filling the lanes with convoys and sealing off orchards and woods for military use. Elizabeth, who had come seeking peace, found herself living in the middle of a vast military operation. Yet even this she absorbed into her writing, not directly as reportage but as a deeper understanding of how ordinary lives are shaped by forces beyond their control. Her account of the night before D‑Day — the low rumble of engines, the stillness of the morning, the sudden emptiness of Torbay — is one of the most vivid passages in her autobiography, and it echoes through the wartime novels she produced during these years. The contrast between the beauty of the valley and the violence gathering across the Channel sharpened her sense of the fragility of peace, a theme that runs quietly beneath much of her work.
Her mother’s declining health added another layer of complexity to her life in Marldon. Elizabeth cared for her at home until her death in 1951, drawing on the support of neighbours and the steadiness of the village community. The experience deepened her understanding of suffering, patience, and endurance — qualities that appear again and again in her characters. The compassion that marks her later novels, the sense that redemption is found not in grand gestures but in small acts of love, owes much to these years of quiet, difficult service.
When her mother died, Elizabeth left Devon for a time to recover, but the books she wrote afterwards still carried the imprint of Marldon. Even when she settled later in Peppard Common, the Devon years remained the imaginative centre of her writing life. The valley around Westerland, the lanes to Cockington, the orchards and hedgerows, and the quiet rhythms of village life had become part of her creative landscape, shaping the tone and texture of her work long after she moved away.
The Castle
Hid deep in the heart of the woods, haunted and old,
The shell of a Castle stills stands, a story told,
Built high on a rock in the woods, frozen and cold.
Deep are the night-dark shadows under the wall,
Breathlessly whispering downwards the snowflakes fall,
Shrouding the desolate towers in a stainless pall.
Fearful within me my own heart, failing, has died,
I too in the woods am frozen, bereaved, sore tried.
Alone here…… There in the shadows, who was it sighed?
There, in the bastioned walls where the gateway stands,
Are there shadows within its shadows, weaving the strands
Back through the loom of past sorrow with pain worn hands?
Shadows weeping a world grown cold and stark with pain,
Mourning once more the lights put out, put out again,
The loveliness broken and lost, the young men slain.
Has sorrow alone lived here for a hundred years?
Is only hatred immortsl, men’s craven fears?
Only the weeping of women, their uesless tears?
Not winter only reigns here in this haunted place,
As the cold clouds part, defeated, the sunbeams lace
The dark trees with their diamond light, touch the worn face
Of the frozen stone with colour, with azure fire
Of spring-times long past,yet alive, the hot desire
Of summers never forgotten, hopes that aspire
For ever, courage unbeaten, valour aflame,
The unshaken victory of the men who name
Holy things to their strength…….Nor fear, nor hate nor shame
Is theirs…. I see the flashing of arms on the wall,
Hear the deep roar of the conflict, the thrilling call,
Of the silver trumpet sounding high on the tall
Towers of God’s immortal fortress, that he made
Against the evil out of the love of men laid
At his feet, their sweat, their blood to the last drop paid.
For this is the rock that for all time man defends,
The rock of his soul against which all evil spends
Its fury in vain in the warfare that never ends.
And these the embattled walls that the heroes trod,
Swift winged with flame, their feet with the gospel shod,
For this is the house of all life, the house of God.
Lift up, lift up ypur constant hearts, the trumpet cries,
Lift them up to the shining walls, the sun drenched skies,
For beyond the night for ever the sun will rise.
— Elizabeth Goudge
