Thomas Rowlandson was a remarkably prolific jobbing illustrator of the Georgian era. He drew book illustrations, caricatures, political cartoons, comic scenes, bawdy episodes and erotic tableaux, always with a keen eye for the ridiculous and absurd in Georgian society and politics. Among the thousands of Rowlandson engravings stacked away in libraries is a small collection of English landscapes described as Sketches from Nature and one of them titled Taunton Vale, Somersetshire seems to show a very early view of the Quantock Hills.
It’s very hard to know what the Quantocks looked like two hundred years ago and more. We have many old photographs, and we have Victorian paintings and etchings from the 1860s but earlier images are very few and hard to find, so it’s exciting to see Rowlandson’s sketch. The exact location is uncertain but the hills overlooking Taunton can only be the Quantocks.
A cart drawn by a team of eight horses sets out maybe towards Watchet and Williton or through Kingston past a shabby roadside inn named The Royal Oak. The hill slopes are entirely unenclosed by hedges, the coombes wooded and the hilltop treeless. A cluster of thatched cottages sits in the valley ahead and a distant high point – Wills Neck perhaps or Crowcombe Hill – looms grey over them. Intriguing, the plate is dated 1822.
~ Tim Whittingham