Clouds Hill

Clouds obscure the name,
Giving refuge to the mind.
Only friends enter.


I have long wanted to visit Clouds Hill - final home of  T.E Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia).

A strange, brilliant and complex man and a source of fascination for my father.  He was an original thinker and unconventional and  yet seemed to need the constraints of the military.

He wanted to escape from being "Lawrence of Arabia" and from the high rank he achieved and to enrol as a private.  His dreams of achieving an Arab state  were thwarted by the carving up of the desert by British and French and he felt betrayed by this.

While in the desert his life was simple, stripped down to essentials and this the way he lived at Clouds Hill.   Just the essentials as interpreted by a single, highly individual mind: panelling, bookshelves, bare wood and undyed leather.  A place to read, to listen to music and to sleep.  These were the things which mattered.


A greek inscription over the doorway of the cottage apparently means "Why worry".


In a letter he wrote:
‘I have lavished money these last . . . months upon the cottage, adding a water-supply, a bath, a boiler, bookshelves, a bathing pool (a tiny one, but splashable into): all the luxuries of the earth. Also I have thrown out of it the bed, the cooking range: and ignored the lack of drains. Give me the luxuries and I will do without the essentials.’  

While at Clouds Hill he had many visitors, local artists and literary figures, also prominent thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw, E M Forster and  Robert Graves.

He left the RAF in 1936, two months later he was fatally wounded in a motorbike accident just a few yard from his home - he was 46.