Raveloe

Raveloe,Village in the Midlands; scene of the story of Silas Marner. "Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices . . . it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour's journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an importantlooking village with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with well-walled orchards and ornamental weather-cocks, standing close upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory, which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the churchyard." No village has been definitely identified as the original of Raveloe, though Bulkington, in Warwickshire, about three miles south-east of Nuneaton, has been suggested as a possible original. (See Coventry Libraries Committee, Catalogue of the George Eliot Centenary Exhibition, p. 12.)

<em>Silas Marner</em>

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