Home - Edward Hunt's Forest of Dean Miscellany

The Queen of Forests all, that West of Severne lie

Her broad and bushy top Deane holdeth up so high,

The lesser are not seen, she is so tall and large.

Micheal Drayton (1563-1631)

This site contains a personal selection of writing about the Forest of Dean. The selection embraces fact, fiction and fantasy; nature and supernature. My aim is to focus on the interesting and the unusual.

Here you will find: Samuel Pepys, Dennis Potter, Catherine Drew, Michael Drayton, F. W. Harvey, Arthur Bryant, Cyril Hart, John Byng, William Gilpin, D.H. Lawrence, William Cobbett, Nikolai Tolstoy, Alfred, Lord Tennyson...

...and also King Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Gawain...

...the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, The Mabinogion…

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To help you find your way around I have set up an alphabetical index on this page:

Forest Index

Please contact me with your comments and ideas!

Winifred Foley (1914-2009)

On 21^st March 2009, Winifred Foley died aged 94. Born Winifred Mary Mason, in the village of Brierley, her beautiful and truthful autobiographical books evoke life in and out of the Forest of Dean in the last century. She was the Forest of Dean's Flora Thompson. In "A Child in the Forest", she spoke with an authentic voice about the hardships and joys of being brought up in the Forest of Dean in the twenties. Her father was a miner and was not allowed to work for seven years due to his role as a leader in the General Strike of 1926. This experience, and the terrible impoverishment she had known, fostered her lifelong socialist views which she shared with her husband Syd Foley.

We owe her a debt of gratitude for describing so lovingly and for being such an integral part of our story.

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The Forest of Dean

The Forest of Dean is a place of natural beauty and poetry as well as mystery and magic. It is the home of beasts and fairies, men and elves. These elements constitute the warp and weft of Forest history. Nature and Supernature combine to create this multi-dimensional environment equalling in its diversity the environs of Old London Town.

Many have come here with a lust for land and domination but none could subdue the spirit of freedom and equality permeating the very air itself and coursing through the bodies of these unique and enchanted beings. They had come from far and near with grim faces and hard hearts but very soon the would-be invader was enchanted, tamed and absorbed and had become indistinguishable from his fellows, adding to and enhancing the whole.

Every atom of every molecule of every breath you take in the Forest has filled the lungs, or wafted through the hair, or blown the fires, or cooled the blood of a thousand Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Normans who have walked these trails; have lived their lives from birth to death under this green mantle; and drenched the earth with their tears, their sweat and their blood.

Within these woods many characters of legend and myth have breathed and walked. Many more have lived and died unknown: their deeds half-remembered or mingled in the fairy stories and rhymes that parents and grandparents tell their children or the tales that old men share in front of roaring fires to while away the long winter nights. But the stones and rocks never forget: they record every moment, every emotion and every passion, and hold it in their vibrating hearts forever.