Ten top books of the English moor

At the Guardian William Atkins's tagged ten top books of the English moor...ie, not counting three of the more famous books in that tradition, RD Blackmore's Lorna Doone, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. One title on the list:

Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes

For Hughes himself, growing up in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire, Tarka "gave shape and words to my world". In this volume of poetry he returns to the valleys and moors of his Calder Valley youth, reviving the land's myths and histories, and his own boyhood memories. In the volume's early editions his poems are accompanied by Fay Godwin's monolithic black-and-white photographs of the valley and its surmounting hills. She and Hughes shared with Emily Brontë a vision of these moors as not merely ruinous and bone-strewn, but places of transcendence – "a stage for the performance of heaven".

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue