PEOPLE OF A FAMOUS NOVEL

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 257, 26 July 1930, Page 31

PEOPLE OF A FAMOUS NOVEL

\ The Ridds to Leave Doone Valley

Mr. Thomas Ridd, descendant of "Girt Jan Ridd,” who wooed and won the lovely Lorna Boone, daughter of the wicked Doones of Exmoor, is to leave the historic Yenworthy Farm in the parish of Oare, where his ancestors tilled the land since men can remember.

Girt Jan Ridd’s love story has been immortalised in It. D. Blackmore’s romance ‘‘Lorna Doone,” in which it is stated that the Kidds were “seised in their own right of the best and largest of the Oare parish.” But now the family pays rent for what they hold in Oare and strangers will take possession of Yenworthy after Michaelmas.

I made my way to-day over the rough moorland track near to where the old county gate divided Devon

from Somerset, and along the sunken bridal path where the marauding Doones, bent on pillage, had often trod before me (writes a correspondent of the “Sunday Express”).

And I came at length to Yenworthy Farm, which overlooks the sparkling sea, hundreds of feet below.

Mr. Thomas Ridd was ploughing the historic soil for the last time. The long-barrelled, flintlock gun which Carver Doone poked through the window of Oare Church hangs on the wall of the old homestead.

. His pretty young wife and his two children, a little Jan Ridd and a girl called Lorna, stood at the doorway. But the story of the Doones and of Girt Jan Ridd means nothing to Mr. Thomas Ridd. “It does not worry me. I do not bother about it at all,” he said.