A guide to literary Exeter.
This guide results from a Men's Walk round Exeter on 20 March 2021 to raise funds for Hospiscare. It took in an eleven mile circuit as required by the walk, and was designed to cover sites in and around the City which have literary associations, inspired by Exeter's designation as Britain's UNESCO city of literature at the end of 2019. The first sites visited were supplemented the following Monday when a similar distance was covered around the University and along the riverside. It is hoped that the guide can be further developed both to serve as a gazetteer of Exeter's literary heitage and to highlight current literary activity in Exeter during the period of the UNESCO initiative. The guide has been split into six sections which group the sites within different areas of Exeter:
Walk 1. The Cathedral Close and the West Quarter.
Walk 2. The High Street and around.
Walk 3. East through Heavitree to Sowton and Pinhoe.
Walk 4. North to the University and Saint David.
Walk 5. South through Saint Leonard to Topsham.
Walk 6. West of the river: Saint Thomas, Exwick, Alphington and Ide.
The area covered by the walks is outlined on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map of Exeter, dating from 1809. The open landscape depicted on that map shows that the walks suggested outside the walled city are not intended to be followed slavishly. The sites are scattered and sometimes not worth the long trek to hunt them out as there is little of historic interest to be seen. It reflects the relatively recent extension of the city: Saint Thomas and Exwick were not incorporated into the city until 1900, Heavitree in 1913 and Topsham, including Countess Wear, as well as Pinhoe and Alphington as recently as 1966. There has also been a counterflow of printers, publishers and archives away from the centre into trading estates on the outskirts of the city.
This guide results from a Men's Walk round Exeter on 20 March 2021 to raise funds for Hospiscare. It took in an eleven mile circuit as required by the walk, and was designed to cover sites in and around the City which have literary associations, inspired by Exeter's designation as Britain's UNESCO city of literature at the end of 2019. The first sites visited were supplemented the following Monday when a similar distance was covered around the University and along the riverside. It is hoped that the guide can be further developed both to serve as a gazetteer of Exeter's literary heitage and to highlight current literary activity in Exeter during the period of the UNESCO initiative. The guide has been split into six sections which group the sites within different areas of Exeter:
Walk 1. The Cathedral Close and the West Quarter.
Walk 2. The High Street and around.
Walk 3. East through Heavitree to Sowton and Pinhoe.
Walk 4. North to the University and Saint David.
Walk 5. South through Saint Leonard to Topsham.
Walk 6. West of the river: Saint Thomas, Exwick, Alphington and Ide.
The area covered by the walks is outlined on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map of Exeter, dating from 1809. The open landscape depicted on that map shows that the walks suggested outside the walled city are not intended to be followed slavishly. The sites are scattered and sometimes not worth the long trek to hunt them out as there is little of historic interest to be seen. It reflects the relatively recent extension of the city: Saint Thomas and Exwick were not incorporated into the city until 1900, Heavitree in 1913 and Topsham, including Countess Wear, as well as Pinhoe and Alphington as recently as 1966. There has also been a counterflow of printers, publishers and archives away from the centre into trading estates on the outskirts of the city.
The route covered on 20 March was not exactly as planned and superimposed on the 1809 Ordnance Survey map in an earlier version of this page, but I covered about eleven miles in all, three more than the eight laid down by Hospiscare, most of it valiantly accompanied by my cousin. I had to omit the northern section around the University and part of the route along the river, but I completed this with my wife Jill on Monday, adding another eight miles to the total. There were little bonuses along the way. A surprising proportion of the Saturday walk was along footpaths or cycle routes lined with primroses and daffodils and with spectacular views northwards to the Cathedral and southwards down to the Exe Estuary from Pynes Hill, eastwards towards Coleridge's Ottery St Mary from above Sowton and westwards across the valley to Richard Hooker's Heavitree from Hill Barton. At William Pollard's printing establishment in Sowton we had an interesting conversation with an employee with forty years experience in the printing industry who showed us their memorial garden with the gates transported from their Southernhay premises. And the overcast day and the relatively deserted streets in the city centre, even on a Saturday, made ideal conditions for photography. The Monday also brought its bonuses, notably an encounter with former Exeter University Librarian and poet Alasdair Paterson who drew our attention to a novella by the French writer Georges Perec (1936 – 1982). Les revenentes (1972) is a univocalic piece of writing in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. A brilliant English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter text: jewels, secrets, sex (also univocalic) in the collection Three. It is set in a bizarre univocalic Exeter nobody would recognise, so unfortunately cannot figure in this literary tour, but we must ensure that a copy of the original and translation is available in an Exeter library somewhere. I also ran to earth the lodging the novelist George Gissing rented when he found it impossible to work at his home in Prospect Park which he shared with a wife who was mentally unstable and often became violent.
This page last updated 21 April 2021
