Literary Trails of the West Country

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Summary

It is a truth universally acknowledged that many of the giants of English literature, including the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ herself, have associations and connections with the south-west of England. We have therefore strung together a sequence of visits that unites some of our best loved and most celebrated authors in this corner of the country.

We begin in the village of Lacock, which has been used as the location for countless dramas, notably 'Pride and Prejudice', and continue to Bath, where we have a guided tour of ‘Jane Austen’s Bath’ as well as a visit to the Jane Austen Center, where guides in period costume will provide an informative account of the author’s fascination with Bath. From our base in Somerset, we travel into Devon for a day on the trail of the most celebrated crime writer of them all, Dame Agatha Christie, with visits to the Torquay Museum with its dedicated Christie gallery and Greenway, Agatha’s holiday home, which she referred to as ‘the loveliest place in the world’. On our final day, our attention turns to Thomas Hardy as we head for Dorchester and visit the cottage in which he was born and the house he both designed himself and lived in until his death in 1928.

Note: this tour has been timed so that it can be taken immediately before our Literary Trails of the South Coast tour, with a night in London in between. The South Coast tour also features Jane Austen - please see separate itinerary for details.