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
The Wind in the Willows Elspeth Thomson in 1899, when he was 40; the next year they had their only child, a boy named Alastair (whose nickname was "Mouse") born premature, blind in one eye, and plagued by health problems throughout his life. When Alastair was about four years old, Grahame would tell him bedtime stories, some of which were about a toad, and on his frequent boating holidays without his family he would write further tales of Toad, Mole, Ratty, and Badger in letters to Alastair. In 1908 Grahame took early retirement from his job at the Bank of England and moved with his