Enid Blyton’s B’day: Visit ‘Old Thatch’ Where She Lived & Wrote

Enid Blyton was enamoured by her cottage Old Thatch, ever since she first came to live there.

The prolific writer who gave us some of our most enduring childhood memories, Enid Blyton, was born on this day – 11 August, in 1897.

Her birth anniversary is a good time to tell the little story of Old Thatch – her cottage, where she penned some of her most famous books.

One look at the breathtaking 17th century property is enough to remind you of all the times you saw a gorgeous countryside house and called it ‘Blytonesque’.

Reportedly, Enid Blyton herself – when she’d first come to live here with her husband Hugh Pollock in the summer of 1929 – was enamoured with it.

This cottage also became the name of a series of her books. One volume, revolving around a little girl named Gillian (named after Blyton’s oldest daughter) and her adventures in the fields surrounding her home, is specifically named Old Thatch.

Old Thatch, according to The Telegraph, is located a few miles from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. It was Blyton’s home for nine years, from 1929 to 1938. This was the epicentre of her creativity – the place where many of her most beloved characters were created, establishing the idyllic cottage as a literary star in its own right.

Some of the books penned by her while living in this very cottage, are The Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair series – beautiful in the sphere of imagined worlds.

According to The Telegraph, in 1938, when her daughters were aged seven and three, Blyton moved to a new house in Beaconsfield named Green Hedges.

In her diaries, she described Old Thatch as a ‘fairytale house’, adding:

You enter through a funny old lych gate with a thatched roof and there are big fruit trees and yew hedges, in which hosts of little birds have built their nests. Roses bloom everywhere.

In July 2015, the cottage made news for being put up on sale by its current owners, for a price of £1.85 million.

One can only hope that whoever buys this house will have a bit of the starry-eyed wonderer in them – if for nothing else, than to honour the memory of arguably the greatest children’s book writer that ever lived.

For, if one looked really closely, at the sight of Old Thatch, one could almost feel Enid Blyton sitting there, nestled amidst the folds of nature, typing furiously at her typewriter, shadows of the trees in her bower falling gently on her.

(This article is being republished from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of Enid Blyton’s birth anniversary. It was first published on 11 August 2015.)