Riseholme

Riseholme, pretty Elizabethan village in Worcestershire - although reference is sometimes confusingly made to Warwickshire. It was a four hour train journey from London. Many half-timbered houses, a ducking-pond and village green with stocks. For a short time Riseholme boasted a museum. Home of Philip and Emmeline Lucas in The Hurst and of many friends and neighbours, including Georgie Pillson.

Overview
When about to tell Georgie of her intention to buy a house on the Green, opera diva Olga Bracely remarked of Riseholme, "It's not a question of liking: it's a  mere detail of not being able to do without  it. I don't like breathing, but I should die if I didn't. I want some delicious, hole-in-the-corner, lazy backwater sort of place, where nothing ever happens, and nobody ever does anything."

Sadly in some ways, Riseholme faded in Lucia's affections, perhaps understandably after the death of her husband, Pepino. ''Riseholme, once so vivid and significant, had during these weeks at Tilling been fading like an ancient photograph exposed to the sun, and all its features, foregrounds and backgrounds. It no longer had anything to occupy Lucia's energies, or call out her unique powers of self- assertion. She had so swept the board with her management of the Elizabethan fete that no further progress was possible. '' Riseholme is generally considered to have been based upon Broadway in the Cotswolds. In his "Life of E.F.Benson" Brian Masters mentions that the Bensons made regular visits to Riseholme, where Bishop Wordsworth and his family lived. Here one could walk among mysterious dark woods, and hope never to be found, one could catch frogs and snakes, one could dart and run and taste freedom as nowhere else. Fred and his sister Maggie would have long outings together at Riseholme, delighting in nature and her varied population. He wrote "At Riseholme we went on a cow's back and took a rabbit up in our arms.  I saw the funniest thing, it was a goose turing somersaults in the water...."