For award-winning, internationally-acclaimed author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). By Anthony Lawton: godson, cousin & literary executor. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical fiction, children's literature and books, films, TV & radio, including The Eagle of the Ninth, Sword at Sunset, Song for a Dark Queen, The Mark of the Horse Lord, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers, Dawn Wind, Blue Remembered Hills.
Rosemary Sutcliff lived some of her childhood in North Devon. Her old house – for I think this is it – is now, I find, a North Devon bed and breakfast venue.
How lovely to see a picture of Netherne. Rosemary Sutcliff describes it with great affection in her memoir, “Blue Remembered Hills”, evoking the same marvellous sense of place and the natural world that characterises her novels.
(I have condensed the original text a little)
“In the end we found our own home for our own selves. We found Netherne, which was to be our home for more than twenty years.
It was quite an ordinary house, with white rough-cast walls and a red roof— The thing that made the house like no other house was its position. It was closely related to Wuthering Heights, perched up on the high ground, moor and hill-farm country, between the Taw and the Torridge. Three big fields went with the house, and a three-acre spinney surrounded it on two and a half sides, without whose shelter it would surely have blown away altogether on the wings of the westerly gales that made the trees grow all one way and salt-burned their leaves to brown before ever the colours of autumn came.
From the first year to the last, I loved Netherne. I loved my small bedroom, one window looking to Dartmoor, the other into the crown of a large lilac tree, and across that, down the length of the kitchen garden to the wood. I loved going to bed on winter nights with Orion hanging in the Dartmoor window, getting up on winter mornings to fifty miles of flaming sunrise. I loved the curlews coming up from the coast in March to breed on the rough fields around the house – March nights when their calling, that wonderful ascending spiral of sound which is their full mating call, went on until midnight and started again four hours later. I still miss the curlews and the fifty-mile sunsets and sunrises, and the foxgloves in the deep-banked Devon lanes in June. I think I always will.”
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 
Thank you for this!
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How lovely to see a picture of Netherne. Rosemary Sutcliff describes it with great affection in her memoir, “Blue Remembered Hills”, evoking the same marvellous sense of place and the natural world that characterises her novels.
(I have condensed the original text a little)
“In the end we found our own home for our own selves. We found Netherne, which was to be our home for more than twenty years.
It was quite an ordinary house, with white rough-cast walls and a red roof— The thing that made the house like no other house was its position. It was closely related to Wuthering Heights, perched up on the high ground, moor and hill-farm country, between the Taw and the Torridge. Three big fields went with the house, and a three-acre spinney surrounded it on two and a half sides, without whose shelter it would surely have blown away altogether on the wings of the westerly gales that made the trees grow all one way and salt-burned their leaves to brown before ever the colours of autumn came.
From the first year to the last, I loved Netherne. I loved my small bedroom, one window looking to Dartmoor, the other into the crown of a large lilac tree, and across that, down the length of the kitchen garden to the wood. I loved going to bed on winter nights with Orion hanging in the Dartmoor window, getting up on winter mornings to fifty miles of flaming sunrise. I loved the curlews coming up from the coast in March to breed on the rough fields around the house – March nights when their calling, that wonderful ascending spiral of sound which is their full mating call, went on until midnight and started again four hours later. I still miss the curlews and the fifty-mile sunsets and sunrises, and the foxgloves in the deep-banked Devon lanes in June. I think I always will.”
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