Lived: Wootton Courtenay
Recording made: 2002
Length of recording: 1 hr 40 mins
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GWEN BURNELL
Born:
Wheddon Cross,
Somerset, 1920
Lived:
Wootton Courtenay
Recording made: 2002
Length of recording:
1 hr 40 mins
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Gwen Burnell is one of those rare things, somebody who has lived in Wootton Courtenay all her life. Her parents farmed at Fairgarden and she worked with her father after she left school. She loves farming, and hunting, and dogs, and has always been an outdoor person. She rode the same pony to the opening meet for 17 years. She stayed on the farm as a land girl during the war, when they had three evacuee children, and met her husband at a benefit dance in Exford.
She thinks people don't know what work is nowadays and has no time at all for the National Park or National Trust. They don't burn the moorland enough any more and the heather and gorse have got too high. Her husband set fire to Dunkery one night, in protest. You wouldn't do it nowadays, she says, somebody would come along.
postscript - Gwen Burnell died in May 2002