Fell Farm Campers

Fell Farm #3

by Marjorie Lloyd

Young reader novel about camping over the Easter holiday.

Genres: Childrens

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 1960

About the author

British children's author Marjorie Lloyd was born in 1909 in Haydock, Lancashire. She was educated at Cowley Girls' School, St. Helen's, from 1920-27, and at Birmingham University, where she read Mathematics, and took a teaching diploma, from 1928-32. She also studied at the City of Liverpool College of Art. A teacher for a number of years, she was variously employed at Haydock, Macclefield, Wigton (in Cumbria), and at the Princess Mary High School in Halifax. She retired in 1948 in order to devote herself to writing, going to live with a younger sister.

Reviews

[Kailey (Luminous Libro) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this classic little story about four siblings who go camping in the fells (mountains).

Pat and Jan are the two brothers, and I liked how they can be tough, rough and tumble, but also very protective and gentle with their sisters, Hyacinth and Kay. The siblings make a great team, and they go hiking all over the mountains, making camp near a farmhouse, where the farmer and his wife give them their meals.

I think this is the third book in the Fell Farm series, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone.

The adventures the siblings have are everyday things but charming and interesting. They set up the details of their camp site, and take their first hike up the trails. A killer wild dog is loose among the sheep and they join the hunt to track it down. Two rude boys from the city make trouble for the siblings. They hike up to the top of the mountains where there is still snow and must find their way back down. Jan is the bird-watcher of the group, and he drags Hyacinth on an adventure on the tarn (lake) looking for a tawny owl. After days of rain, the camp tents are nearly flooded out, and the children have to find dry ground.
Lots of little adventures for the gang to show their mettle and have their fun!

This book reminded me a little bit of Little House on the Prairie, since it's all about the details of survival in the outdoors. The style and feeling of the writing is similar too.
Altogether a delightful book, and I would love to read the rest of the series!

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slightly different from the first two, as it's written in the third person and almost has something approaching a plot. It's probably the best of the three and there are lots of top camping and hiking tips. The book captures exactly what a holiday under canvas is like - the little routines, the disruption of rain, the sense of adventure.

My copy has illustrations by Shirley Hughes, which is always a bonus in any book.

[Capn]

Inside cover:

The Easter holiday at Fell Farm promised to be the last on their own for the five Brownes (two pairs of twins and Sally), for Mother and Father were coming home in the summer. Then came the news that the Jenks had the builders in, and could not put them up. 'But we must go!' they cried, and found the right solution - to camp, using the farm as a base, drawing food from it and going there for one hot meal a day - a most satisfactory arrangement all round. Getting the camp going kept them busy. It has to be properly organized as they were camping for a whole Easter holiday - weeks, not just a matter of days. Still they had time for good outings and some adventures, as when a night of rain started a torrent down the fellside and right through the girls' sleeping tent. The Jenks took them to Hound Trails, and they joined in the search for a dog which was worrying sheep. One day the camp was raided and almost wrecked. Perhaps best of all was a moonlight tramp over the hills, right through the night.
It is a good sensible story by one who understands good camping, and it fairly tingles with keen air straight from the fell tops. Earlier books about the same place and people are Fell Farm Holiday and Fell Farm for Christmas. Shirley Hughes has done the delightful illustrations and cover design.
For ages 10 - 14

'A good sensible story' - that's code for dull, isn't it? I got this for 20p, so... low-risk. :)

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about a family of children camping in England's Lake District. As such, it is virtually impossible to write about it without making reference to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series. Ransome more or less invented the holiday "camping and tramping" adventure story which had its heyday in the mid-20th century on British children's fiction lists. He is easily that genre's most popular and enduring writer, and his best loved books have a lake-land setting. He is to camping in the Lake District as Rowling is to schools of wizardry.

Published in 1960 some 30 years after Swallows and Amazons, Fell Farm Campers, like its predecessor, concerns a family of five children, two boys and three girls (the youngest, in both books, is a girl who's generally left out of the action). Given that Marjorie Lloyd was undoubtedly aware that she was following in Ransome's footsteps, it's odd that she chose a family that corresponds so closely to Ransome's Walkers, but perhaps she thought she was being original in having the four older children be two sets of twins. There is another difference between these two books that is far more striking. Ransome's children are living a vigorous imaginative life as explorers and pirates. Their lake is a vast unexplored sea beset with dangers. If they could live entirely off the land, they would, but since circumstances dictate that they have to eat tinned bully beef warmed up over their campfire, they make do by calling it pemmican. The interplay of the "realness" of their imaginary adventures, and the accommodations they have to make to fit in what is actually around them -- holiday makers in rented rowboats cluttering up the harbor in Windermere, excuse me, Rio, are "native canoes" -- these things add a layer of depth and amusement to the story. By contrast, Marjorie Lloyd's campers think of themselves as English school-children who are sleeping in tents on a farm in the Lake District, and go quite gamely to the farm wife's table for their dinner once a day, a circumstance that would fill the Swallows and Amazons with despair. To someone steeped in Ransome's ethos, there seems to be an almost aggressive puritanical fervor in the way in which Lloyd uses real Lake District place names. At one point, her family strolls up to the summit of Coniston's Old Man in an hour or two, undoubtedly taking the path the Swallows and Amazons scorned when they took two days to scale Kachenjunga with ropes and pick axes. I must be fair and say that Lloyd's love of the Lake District feels strong and true, and she describes it beautifully -- perhaps she felt a bit resentful that Ransome's children felt the need to romanticize it. But ultimately her book is just matter of fact and bland, and suffers sadly from a near entire absence of plot. It is, incidentally, the third of a series, starting with Fell Farm Holiday.

[Heather Cawte · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite childhood books. I was far too much of a wimp to go camping and walking in the Lake District, but I loved reading about it! The chapter about the moonlit night walk is particularly vivid.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have hazy memories of reading the first two in this series when I was on a family holiday in Keswick many years ago. My recollections were of not-particularly-exciting but 'ok' stories. (Having said that, I was a child who read the back of a cereal packet if nothing else was available!)

I'm not sure if it's the passage of time (although I still enjoy most of the books I enjoyed as a child) or that the third volume in the series is worse than the previous two, but this was...boring. The first half reads pretty much like a manual on how to go camping and hiking responsibly. It also feels a bit preachy. The children (twins of 15, twins of 13 and an 8-year-old) are portrayed as enjoying household chores. The girls would rather wash dishes than have a day out and 'have fun' hanging out washing, while the boys are always enthusiastic over digging trenches and mending things. I've seen this series compared to Arthur Ransome's, but although his books were written decades earlier, they are much more exciting and far less reliant on gender stereotypes. Lloyd's children are steady, sensible, devoid of imagination and happiest when they are acting like miniature middle-aged adults!

The book does become mildly more interesting in the second half: two of the children become stranded on an island when their raft floats away and have to swim the quarter mile back to the mainland and they all go for a midnight hike. Possibly the average 1960s teen might have found this exciting, but I'm not sure today's youngsters will have the same reaction. Probably best suited to those who remember enjoying these books as a child and want to wallow in nostalgia. Otherwise, stick to Ransome - equally good sense of place, more rounded characters and better storylines.

[scarlettraces · Rating 3 out of 5]

terrifically wholesome (this is not a bad thing). it's nice sometimes to read about nice middle-class children engaging in nice activities in a time that probably never was. and also i learnt about hound trailing (initially i thought this was a misprint for trials - that's what you get for growing up with 4 million sheep - but no). apparently this is also an Arthur Ransome thing but i must have missed it in those books.

[Avril · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely mid-20th century middle-class holiday book. I enjoyed this book more than the first in the series, the only other one I've read, I think because it's told in the third-person and because the illustrations are by Shirley Hughes rather than the author.

[Cybèle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminiscent of Arthur Ransome, a very nostalgic story of children camping and hiking in the fells.

[Goldberry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A marginally tamer Swallows and Amazons, this still brings the fells alive beautifully - and the joys of outdoor independence.