"The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn."

So begins Flora Thompson's famous portrait of her childhood in the 1870s in a tiny Oxfordshire hamlet. Her delightful memories, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, evoke in affectionate detail a cherished world now lost.