Secrets of Candleford: the real Flora Thompson

When Richard Mabey was researching this biography of Flora Thompson, author of Lark Rise to Candleford, he happened to stay at a farmhouse B&B near Bath. Ambling around, he found

something very curious … There were two rows of cottages facing each other, with a dusty track between them …There were clean curtains in the windows. The gardens were in good order, with sweet peas in flower and rows of fat cabbages. It was a vision of an English village as idyllic as a Helen Allingham painting … I edged round the back and realised they were two dimensional … a façade but nothing behind.

The next day the farmer’s wife explained that this was one of the sets for the BBC production of Lark Rise to Candleford — a long way from the Oxfordshire, where the book was set and where Flora Timms (as she then was) grew up, but ‘much closer to the rural dream’.