It was obviously this sentiment and love for the county which inspired him to write his gripping story, drawing on the history and scenery that surrounded him. Richard is rather endearingly quoted to have said “In everything, except the accident of my birth I am a Devonian my ancestry were all Devonians my sympathies and feelings are all Devonian”. His Grandfather, also called John Blackmore,was the rector of Oare church (map ref OL 9 SS 47.3 80.2) from 1809 until his death in 1842. When his father remarried he went to live with his father and new stepmother in the little village of King’s Nympton in Devon and spent a rural childhood in the hills and woods of Devon with his brother and three half-siblings. Sadly his mother died of typhus when Richard was just a few months old and he was raised by his Aunt, Mary Frances Knight and her husband, the reverend Richard Gordon, at Elsfield, near Oxford until he was seven years old. Richard Dodderidge Blackmoor was born in 1825 in Longworth, Berkshire(now Oxfordshire), the 2 nd son of a curate, John Blackmore.
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