A m I turning into my mother? I said I’d never be here, and yet I find myself in a rain-dashed Exmoor car park grappling with waterproofs and insisting to my sceptical four-year-old daughter, Scarlett, that it’s going to stop raining any minute. I used to be in Scarlett’s position. My mother, Susan, loved Exmoor National Park in Somerset and Devon and many a childhood holiday was spent clad in not-quite-waterproof-enough jackets, sodden sleeves stuck to folded arms as I swore I’d never return.
Yet here we are, because it is a beautiful place, and I want to introduce my daughter to it. Come rain or shine, it would seem. This is something my mother would have done herself, but she died a few years before I had my own children and so it falls to me to engender a love of this part of the world — the part her side of the family hailed from — in my offspring.
This year the national park celebrated its 70th birthday (my mum also would have) and I decide there will be no better time than this..
