Toad Hall (The Wind in the Willows) Toad Hall (The Wind in the Willows) Toad Hall is the fictional home of Mr. Toad, a character in the 1908 novel, "The Wind in the Willows", by Kenneth Grahame. On his retirement from the Bank of England in 1908, Grahame returned to Blewbury in Berkshire, the county in which he had grown up. In October that year he published "The Wind in the Willows", a novel for children featuring an array of anthropomorphic characters, including Rat (a water vole), Mole, Badger and Toad. Toad lives in a house on the edge of the River Bank, Toad Hall. The novel
Scottish Renaissance He was also the first Scots Makar (the official national poet), appointed by the inaugural Scottish government in 2004. Alexander Gray was an academic and poet, but is chiefly remembered for his translations into Scots from the German and Danish ballad traditions into Scots, including "Arrows. A Book of German Ballads and Folksongs Attempted in Scots" (1932) and "Four-and-Forty. A Selection of Danish Ballads Presented in Scots" (1954). The Scottish Renaissance increasingly concentrated on the novel, particularly after the 1930s when Hugh MacDiarmid was in isolation in Shetland and its leadership moved to novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973). Gunn's novels, beginning