By the middle of our first
summer living in the cottage, I decided that I would like to give the cottage a
name, honour it so to speak with some originality. The family agreed. The name that sprang to mind
was not actually original at all, but I would imagine is still pretty unique to
this day. Perhaps it is a little sentimental, but I saw it as putting our 'mark'
on the cottage - at least while we were living there. Having heard a tawny owl several times in the garden (its favoured spot is the top of a telegraph pole or the ash) and beyond the fields in the woods, and spotted a short-eared owl in the far
fields below the Edge, my mind was made up. The name I settled on was Skirr
Cottage, after Henry Williamson's first cottage in the North Devon village of Georgeham South London terrace, and no
doubt the traffic noise. Williamson had visited the area before the Great War,
in which he fought, and remembering the still largely unchanged rural way of
life, the beautiful landscape and the peace and quiet, decided to become a
writer and make Georgeham his home, renting a humble labourer's dwelling known
as Skirr Cottage for £5 a year. The name 'Skirr' is derived from the noise made
by the barn owls that had nested in the thatch for generations.
His prize winning book about
an otter, the early drafts written in Skirr Cottage, won him great fame, and he
went on to write some fifty books apart from 'Tarka'. Williamson may have had
his faults, and as a result has been sadly ignored by the public and the
establishment, but for me his books have always, and always will be magical,
painting as they do such vivid pictures of the old rural way of life.
We have yet to see a
barn owl in the vicinity of the cottage but we live
in hope.
in hope.
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