Hope Bourne is renowned as perhaps the greatest Exmoor writer of the twentieth century. For half of her lifetime, Hope lived in and around the village of Withypool on the southern side of the Moor. In the late 1960s, at a time of great personal unhappiness, she sought increasing solace in her friends, neighbours and the landscape around her. Finding her daily business restricted to Withypool and its environs, she set about writing a tribute to the place. She recounts a time before mobile phones and the internet had come to dominate daily life, when communication was a gossip over a half-open stable door and “wireless” meant the radio. She takes the reader around the village, along the river and out again around the parish boundaries, describing people, local events, farms and the changing landscape. Hope’s love for Exmoor is apparent in the detailed descriptions and sketches which capture a way of life gradually slipping from living memory. Having so carefully set down the history and living rhythms of the village, Hope’s manuscript was carefully filed away and lost to view for nearly half a century. Then in 2014 Dr Helen Blackman, archivist to the Exmoor Society, rediscovered the text at the Society’s headquarters, in a nondescript box labelled simply “Village Surveys”. It quickly became apparent that Hope Bourne’s love song to her home village was a significant work that fully deserved to see the light of day. Dr Blackman has subsequently prepared the manuscript for publication and chosen a selection of Hope’s hitherto unseen evocative line drawings to complement the luminous text. Hope Bourne’s Exmoor Village will be a “must have” for Hope Bourne’s many admirers, and for all lovers of Exmoor, its people and places.