Travel was no easy matter

 Friday Night Murder came out in July 2024. My first venture into the crime scene. I think it fits under the label of police procedural since it features Jess Carter leaving the Met and moving north to Hexham as Detective Inspector. On her very first day it snows, she's late for work and hears someone make a disparaging remark about a new Inspector who leaves the top force in the country  - what is wrong with her? Oh, and a dead body of a young girl is found in the snow....

Writing it was fun and the change of scene interesting. Research involved all sorts of investigations into signs of death, post mortems, weapons, all of which should puzzle anyone who ever checks the files on my computer. Also quite different to my usual research into fabrics and styles of the Regency, not to mention hair styles, types of carriages and distances between towns and cities and travelling between them. Travel was no easy matter in 1811 and I can see why most folk stayed at home all their lives.

I am now in the throes of final editing of Saturday Morning Murder which also features Jess Carter and Rory Harrison. Maybe it will be published on KDP by the end of February 25. I certainly hope so. I'm ready to move onto something else. Will there be a Sunday Night Murder? Possibly. It seems a shame to leave all that research unused! 

My new hobby

They say, if you go back far enough, each one of us has a shared ancestor with every other person on earth. 

Scientists estimate that the most recent common ancestor of all humans, probably lived in either Egypt or Babylonia during the classical period. Evidently, we can all trace our ancestry back to this person.

Assuming an average generation time of 20 years, this means that we are all 120th cousins, descended from someone that was alive when the pyramids were already aging structures. (Many millions of other people living at that time also have living descendants, of course. The last common ancestor is simply the one who is an ancestor to all of us, in addition to our many other ancestors who are not common to everyone.)

Of course, within a given ethnic group, the most recent common ancestor will be much more recent than that, especially so within a limited geographical area with low ethnic diversity. Remember that, randomly, some people leave many descendants and others leave none. If you take a country like Scotland, Sweden, or Poland, you really don’t have to go back very far before you discover someone that is a shared common ancestor to the vast majority of living citizens. For example, in the lands of the former Mongolian empire, around 8% of the population are direct descendants of Genghis Kahn and that goes less than 800 years back. Even as far away as North America, around 0.5% of men carry the Y-chromosome of the great Kahn.

Many millions of Americans of Irish ancestry trace their families back to a specific county in Ireland, but the reality is that, if you’re Irish, you are related to all other Irish people and probably a lot more closely than you think.

In fact, everyone on earth with any trace of European ancestry probably has a shared ancestor who lived in the early Middle Ages. Charlemagne has been proposed as a possible candidate.

Family trees aren’t correct anyway

One thing that Ancestry.com won’t often tell you is that the genealogy that you discover may not be accurate anyway. Inferences have to be made when you are dealing with records that are hundreds of years old. There are many surnames and first names that are quite common. There is no way to be sure that the “Jacob Carter” that turns up in one record is the same “Jacob Carter” that shows up in another from fifteen years later, even in the same general area.

Then, as now, many families were on the move. An isolated census record containing only a name is nothing more than a low-resolution snapshot. There is no way to know how many links and associations that genealogy reveals are simply coincidence.

Furthermore, over the past two centuries, it was not uncommon for last names to be changed, misspelled, or misattributed. Records were frequently lost, recreated, or even forged. We think of our identities as relatively fixed now because we have traceable identification cards, birth certificates, and social security numbers from a very early age. But none of that existed until recently.

There is a long article, with an America slant, you may wish to read on this topic
:

Nathan H. Lents, Ph.D., is a professor of molecular biology at John Jay College, of the City University of New York.

The Duties of Servants

I bought a book a long time ago entitled The Duties of Servants. 

I think I discovered it in one of the National Trust bookshops and is an updated version of something published in 1894.  The forward claims that this work appeals equally to both mistress and servant. A mistress will gather from its pages the actual services she is entitled to demand from each servant; the servant will learn of what his or her duties strictly consist.

It seems the house steward is the top dog, as he engages and dismisses both men and women servants. Where there is no house-steward at the head of the household, the housekeeper engages and dismisses female servants and  the butler the indoor male servants. 

The master and mistress  engage their own personal attendants such as the valet, lades-maid and nurse.
if there is no housekeeper then the mistress engages female servants and the master  engages the butler and footmen. If the butler is trusted, he is allowed to engage and dismiss footmen.

The line continues down through smaller and smaller establishments. This little book is going to prove invaluable for my latest project! Although 1911 is not strictly Edwardian, there is much that is still present of that period even though a coronation of George V is about to take place in June of that year. There were many in the upper echelons of society who felt that nothing should ever change, that their lovely way of ife should go on and on and history tells us of a huge number of parties given that year.

Staff of Life and all that

Do you know what pottage is?

In medieval days pottage, bread and ale were the backbone of  everyone's diet. We are told by Andrew Boorde (1542) that "pottage is made of the liquor in the which the flesh is sodden in, with putting-to chopped herbs, and oatmeal and salt."

 The object was to  produce a semi-liquid  but thick spoonmeat.
Cereal pottage was based on the breadcorn of the region - rye, wheat, or a combination of the two, often called maslin; barley, oats or dredge-corn (again a mixture of the last two). These might be ground at home with a hand quern or in a mortar. Both resulted in rough grain. Later this became illegal as it was said to deprive the manorial mill of its dues.

Once this was done, the  mixture was washed and then boiled until it was tender and brown. Some recipes had the grains boiled, cooled and then mixed with cows' milk and a beaten egg stirred in. This earned the name "Frumenty." Rich folk ate it with venison or porpoise. Poor folk ate it as a breakfast or supper dish, with little else but for milk or a little cream or butter if it was to be had. Gruel was oatmeal boiled in water.

In Scotland the cereal pottage was brochan - the old Gaelic word for oatmeal porridge, and sometimes eaten with kail and/or onions. The dalesmen of the Pennines and the Welsh ate a similar oatmeal or oatmeal and barley mixture. In the south of England oatmeal became a favourit thickener for meat and herb pottages as well as breadcrumbs or "amidon," a wheat starch very much like Cato's amulum of sixteen hundred years before.

"Drawn  gruel"  contained lean beef, boiled and pulled to draw out the gravy, and with  the addition of oatmeal, parsley, sage, and salt. "Forced" gruel had pork added, once it had been worked to a pulp in the mortar. Eggs were sometimes added, but considered rather extravagent.

Rice from the south of Europe was added to pottage, too. It came with the spice ships from the Mediterranean and the Countess of Leicester used 110 pounds of it in four months during 1265. In a smaller household, the record show only 3 pounds of rice used in the whole year 1419.

MORE ABOUT LOCATIONS (for writers)

Setting Far After Gold in the north west of Scotland was both better, because I had spent many holidays there, and worse because there wasn’t an equivalent large settlement like Dublin. http://www.ullapool.com/ullapool-history is a starting point for the history of the area and the latest large scale maps show where the settlements and brochs, rivers and fords once were and sometimes, but not always, still are.

 I could describe the landscape because I’d seen it, as long as I made allowances for the changes that have taken place. Forests were much larger around the eleventh century and land was undrained and often swampy. Fords and known tracks were important for travellers and travel by sea was deemed much easier than travel overland. I had experienced the weather of the north west in the summer months and late October, early November; research told me which animals once lived there. We no longer have wolves in Scotland, but wolves and bears were certainly present back then.

Orkney is another of those places where research pays dividends. I’ve never been, but archaeology provides a great deal of information about dwellings, artefacts used, crops grown and where settlements were. Google Earth is fantastic for giving an author a feeling for the size of a place and the geography around it. The satellite imagery will give a very good idea of where you might beach a ship or find a way through the mountains and contour lines of maps will suggest whether you might end up in a bog or fall over a cliff face.

Re-reading the Outlander series

Gabaldon's books stand the test of time well. I'm enjoying reading them this time around (only my second venture into them) more than I did the first time. This may have something to do with the fact that I have more leisure time now to read them properly, word for word, instead of flipping through them to get them finished and go on to something else. The fact that I'm writing now may also have deepened my interest. 

As most of the female reading world knows, they are huge books, usually between 800 and 1,000 pages. Most agents and publishers frown on long books these days, so it will be interesting to see how long the last volume, scheduled for 2018, might be.
I'm almost finished Voyager, vol 2. This is the one where they sail for the West Indies to rescue Young Ian and I don't think I have read this one before. I often wondered, as I read later volumes, how they got to America with half their family around them. Now I'm finding out and along with that I'm discovering  some little bloopers. Yes, mistakes.  

They're not huge mistakes or typos, but because it is nice to know that even such famous authors who have huge publishing resources behind them can have the odd little typo, let me tell you what I've found. First of all she refers to Carter Bar as Carter's Bar. For those of you who have maybe never heard of the place, it is about 45 miles from me; the point on the A68 where the land drops over the ridge of the Cheviots from Northumberland into Scotland. If I checked historical maps I might find it was once called Carter's Bar - but so far all I've found is pubs and cafes in Edinburgh called Carter's Bar. 

The author also refers to "a bramble" from Jamie's mother's rose tapping against the window of Lallybroch. I've never heard of roses having brambles but evidently it is used in the US and people with more gardening experience than me assure me the UK catalogues hold a variety of bramble roses. To me, here in the north of England, we call  brambles those wild thorny shrubs that bear blackberries, and we go brambling.  On that point, I cannot accuse the US publisher of being incorrect. 

But when the author has Jamie and Claire sail from France to a port at Cape Wrath in the extreme north west of Scotland with vertiginous cliffs (there wasn't even a lighthouse until the mid 1800s) and no landing place, planning to pick up supplies at Lewes as they sail on to the West indies, I goggled. Cape Wrath is a hell of a place to get to today, never mind in 1760. The clansmen who rode there to meet them there were heroes! Read chapter 42 "We set sail" and then look at Cape Wrath on Google Earth. 

As for Lewes, it is unlikely that they had sailed from France to Cape Wrath and then proposed to sail south around Cornwall and back up the English Channel to Lewes to pick up supplies. Lewis, the northernmost of the western isles, however, would be on their way since they're sailing for Jamaica. 

Two pages on from this and there's an "exclamation of distate."

So many of the places mentioned in the story are real, but there are fantasy places mixed in, such as Ardsmuir prison. I never found where that was except she says it is on the west coast of Scotland near Coigach. Now, Coigach is the hill north west of Ullapool and there are islands off the headland where the gold could have been hidden on the seal's island. but my theory at the moment is that she uses genuine Scots names but not always as real places. It's become like a game for me to know which are which. Looking out for such things does not detract frm my enjoyment of the story; it's almost a bonus! Sad, I know!

Viking Scotland I

When writing historical novels with Vikings as central characters there is much scope for where to place a story. I like to place them in the north-west Highlands because I have enjoyed so many holidays there. Vikings settled in the northern and western isles and along the coastline of Scotland from Caithness to Argyle during the early part of the ninth century. By the middle of that century a Viking kingdom had been set up.

I soon found that research in this area is sketchy and conclusions were hard to come by. For example, Laithlinn was the Viking name for Scotland. Laithlinn is also written as Lothlend, Laithlind and later Lochlainn, and not all scholars believe the name refers to Scotland. Information in the Irish Annals, the Icelandic Sagas and Norse histories of South West Norway often contradict each other. Old languages present further problems and to add to the confusion, writing itself was not the precise thing it is today. Spelling of names was inconsistent and punctuation often absent. There are also all the problems of who is writing, who paid him to do so and how one-sided was the view put forward. In all of history it is usually the victor who dictates the story.

Scholars continue to argue about terms such as Dane, Norseman and Viking, who they were and where they came from, but proof is sadly lacking. Viking itself isn’t really a name, but a verb; to go “a-viking” was to travel by ship in search of adventure and reward. It is easy to see how the term became a description of a shipload of hungry men waving axes.

The first systems of writing developed and used by the Germanic peoples were runic alphabets and the runes that were carved in stone still exist. Paper evidence of the period is almost none existent. When Edward I invaded in 1296 he ordered all the symbols of Scots nationhood removed to London. A treaty provided for the return of the records but they remained in London until 1948. Only about 200 documents remained.

The archives had an unlucky life. The records that built up after Edward’s time remained safe in the Castle until its capture by Cromwell's army in December 1650, when they were removed to Stirling Castle. When Stirling fell in 1651, the records were carried off by the garrison, or sent to London. Some were returned in 1657, other were sent back in 1660, but the 'Elizabeth', one of the two ships carrying the archives, sank in a storm off the Northumbrian coast.

The surviving records were deposited again in Edinburgh Castle then transferred in 1662 to the Laigh Hall on the Royal Mile. Damaged by damp and vermin, the great fire of 1700 saw them removed to St Giles Church. Eventually they were given a safe and permanent home, but early records pre 1296 are almost non-existent. The King lists survive, but little else.

How do you Write 3

My problem with old maps and gateways continued after I'd sent in the post. Found another map, this time drawn from the English perspective. A tad disconcerting in that the artist had obviously been sitting on a ladder at Leith and drew everything the other way around to the previous maps I'd seen. But it was dated 1544 and was drawn by the attacking English as they arrived to raze Edinburgh to the ground - exactly the time of my story! The map is in the British Library rather than the National Library of Scotland. It showed men attacking the gate - the Water Gate - yippee. I rushed off and re-wrote bits of the chapter to fit the new information.

Unfortunately it did not show the mysterious vanishing gate on the south side of the town. Even if it was there when the English artist arrived, it would not have shown on the drawing, since it was drawn from the northern side. So, I've sent my hero  another way - possibly using a bit of poetic licence, but I'm writing fiction after all. I almost started another hunt but decided to leave well alone. The pieces I found declared that no one quite knew the extent of the Nor Loch nor how long it had been there. They knew when it vanished (or drained away) but according to some it appeared rather suddenly in the 1400s, as a defence against raiders from the sea. Other reports said there had been a lake in much earlier times. So my hero got his feet wet.

Amazingly  my car reported an outside temperature of 17 degrees today when I was out for a walk, and it was gorgeous in the woods. The sun slanted down through the branches and the pathways are covered in gold because the wind had brought down all the yellow pine needles at once. (Actually they may be larch or spruce, but they look wonderful.)

How do you write - 2

spiders work overnight

 Yesterday I didn't think I was going to write very much on how  my writing was done. Today I am thinking differently, hence the figure 2 in the subject line.

Today I was editing a chapter in my wip in which the hero attempts to escape Edinburgh when it is attacked by the English in 1544. There is possibly an irony in that he is English, but the love of life is Scots, and he wants to take her back to England. First of all, they have to get out of Edinburgh, but the gates have been closed - to keep the English out. Then I wondered why I was telling my characters to ride for the West Port (gate) when they wanted, indeed needed, to ride south. Got out the atlas, checked the city of Edinburgh map and made sure it was on the west-east axis that I'd remembered. (Well, of course it was - but these things suddenly sound doubtful when you are in the middle of writing a scene!)
But, I thought, shouldn't they have been heading for the South Port?

That meant searching for the map  of Edinburgh in the 1540s that I remembered using. I couldn't find it in my "research" collection files. Lots of maps of Dublin, past and present, west coast of Scotland, but none of Edinburgh. Grrr. Maybe I hadn't kept a photocopy of the map after all. Back online, I found the required map and hastily checked for gates. Hampered a trifle by the fact that the names were in Latin, which I never did at school, and that the map was very small, I successfully enlarged it so I could see it fantastic detail, but then couldn't figure out a way to print at such a huge size. I found that the key in the corner of the screen had the names in Latin, certainly, but when I looked at all the listings, they were in Scots as well. Since that's English as near as damnit, I was flying.

Then I realised the map was for 1580. Hastily moved back to the one for 1540 and discovered there was a south gate that by 1580  had disappeared - therefore I didn't have a name for it. The wretched gate was there in 1540, I could send my characters through it, but I didn't know what to call it. There are four other gates, all named, present in 1540 and still there in 1580 - but not the one I want. Still, if it has disappeared that long ago, who will know what it was called? At least it was there. I'll say it is the gate at the end of  x street. And that little bit of research has taken the best part of an hour and half.

Orange, anyone?

Someone recommended a book called Medieval Underpants as required reading for all historical fiction authors, so I duly got hold of a copy and read it on my Kindle. Basically it is an American author advising American authors that if they wish to write about European History, they must do the research, otherwise they have UK readers in hysterics. I'm not saying she doesn't address English writers as well, but the slant of the book is more geared to Americans.  There's lots of good things to learn if you are beginning in the field, but after ten years, probably more than ten now, if I stop to think about it, learning the hard way...the only thing that had me worried was oranges.

Yes, oranges. I have a character pick one out of a bowl of pears in October in 1543. A dreadful nagging doubt seized me. I was happy enough about the pears - but decided to look up oranges in my book Food and Drink in Britain by C. Anne Wilson written about 1973.
She was most reassuring. Essentially what she says is: Strange and exotic fruits began to arrive in Britian through trade with southern Europe - oranges, lemons and pomegranates. The original home of citrus fruits was India but they travelled east through Persia. Arabs brought them to Spain. Crusaders tried them around Jaffa in 1191. The fruits began to arrive in Britain about a hundred years later.  Fifteen lemons and seven oranges plus 230 pomegranates arrived on a Spanish ship to Portsmouth in 1289 for Queen Eleanor, formerly a princess of Castile.

Those oranges were the Seville orange, the bitter type that makes marmalade. An Italian vessel brought a large consignment to the Port of London in 1420. Housewives learned to use them in cooking along with currants, prunes, figs and dates. Pine nuts, and walnuts arrived. Almonds were consumed by the royal household - 28,500 pounds of them in 1286. Poor folk ate them in pottages over the days of Christmas, but wealthy household ate them at other times. Apples and pears taken at the end of a meal were usually roasted and eaten with sugar, comfits, fennel seed or aniseed.

By the sixteenth century oranges were coming into the country regularly, both the bitter and sweet variety. Sir Francis Carew began growing them, certainly before 1562,
in Croydon. So I think I can relax and leave my single orange where it is. And then of course there's Nell Gwynne and her oranges int he next century....

Cold days

I seem to be a little out of synch with my posts. I don't usually bother at the weekend, as everyone is busy with family and home, but today - why not? Yesterday was cold, and last night even colder. Today the frost is gripping hard and shows no signs of letting up. The first supply of peanuts and sultanas are out ont he bird table and the blackbirds are mobbing it. I'll save my brisk walk until around midday, when it might be a tad warmer.
Still, it's good weather for getting work done. DH is excavating floorboards in order to insert lights in the ceiling of the floor below, and in between the horrendous whine and howl of the drill-thing he's using, I can get on with my own stuff. Wrote 1200 good words yesterday that didn't need much polishing up, and will aim for the same today.


frozen sundial

The tricky thing is getting my character from point A - point B in France, and trying to describe sixteenth century French countryside. My French is limited, which makes research something of a guessing game. But I'll use what I know of the country today and historical facts I'm sure of, and see what I end up with. Maybe taking Matho to France wasn't such a good idea after all!

Danger Zone

Danger Zone for writers: what is a chav? I’ve asked this question myself, and never got a definitive answer. The Guardian article proves the point – a chav is many things to many people. The fact that the answers are so widely different is worrying if you are a writer trying to pin down a facet of modern UK culture. Take a stance, depict your version in writing, and few will agree with you.

Writing historical novels is much the same. Try looking for the facts in primary sources, and you’ll discover that often they don’t agree in day or date, sometimes not even in year. (Aways tricky when the change over date from one year to the next used to be in the Spring rather than 1st January.) Names are spelled as the owner chose to write it that particular day. Mary Stewart, or Marie Stuart? If you’re an English speaker, you’ll probably go for the former. If you lean towards French, and her signature, you’ll go for the latter. Was her mother Mary of Guise or Marie de Guise? Was the birth on the 8th December, as most reports claim, or on 7th December as Leslie, who had special access to official records, states? Whatever the true record, and there may have only been minutes involved in a time when clocks were not as numerous as today, Mary always believed her birth date was the 8th. Even the date of her father’s death was in doubt for years until they found his coffin in seventeenth century with the death date inscribed on the coffin lid.

Reports came from military men in a hurry, who could be forgiven for mistaking the date of their letter, or the date of an engagement. I doubt they carried diaries or calendars in their doublets. They reported what other men told them, which may have been inaccurate or given a spin in the hope of impressing a master or commander. It is likely, and understandable, that even commanders put things in the best light when they wrote to King Henry VIII. Secretaries wrote what their masters dictated, even if they knew it to be a blatant untruth. Monks wrote pieces that would please their patrons. Private diaries can be wonderful, but it needs to be remembered that Chinese Whispers distort the most accurate report when it is handed on verbally until it reaches the diarist.

So, read widely, pick and choose, use your imagination and interpret the facts as best you can. There’ll always be someone who disagrees with you!

Another rant

link
Wandering about the net last night I found an interesting article comparing books today and thirty years ago. Even though the bestsellers cited are from the New York Times I easily recognised the titles in the older list and had read many of them. But the new list? There are names I know, like Stephen King and Dean Koontz. There are names I recognize but don’t read, like Grisham and Cornwell, but the biggest change for me was the number of names I don’t know.

We have a great many new (as in unknown to me!) authors infiltrating our shelves in the UK these days and I’m not totally happy with it. The trouble is so many of the historical/romance genre published recently are so blatantly modern day heroines plonked down in Regency Bath or London.

If I wanted a sassy, feisty heroine who cares nothing for convention, I’d read a modern story. If I wanted a hunky abs-rippling, shoulder-length haired male who wore his shirt open to the navel come hell or high water, (or the weather conditions, come to that) I’d read a modern James Bond type yarn.

What I want from a historical is a hero/heroine who lives by the conventions of the time, and dare not kick over the traces because they would be ostracised by society, yet still manages to think their way out of trouble. Having a heroine run away in nothing but her petticoat on a snowy night is lunacy, not feisty, and she ought to come to the same bad end as Jane Eyre, who would have died but for that preacher fellow who found her collapsed on the moor. It took her weeks to recover.
I’d like authors to do their research and not do the literary equivalent of the production company that made Elizabeth the golden years (the one with Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen) where they supplied a shot of Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland and stuck a caption reading Fotheringhay Castle, England, on the screen. Do they think people don’t recognise these things?
I think they borrowed the silver foil armour Blanchett wore from the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, and with a straggly wig hanging to her hips she looked anything but regal. I suspect any army would have sniggered in its fists at such a sight. Nor does she have the voice for rousing speeches in the open air. They’d have done better to omit the whole scene in my not so humble opinion. It seems I fall into rant mode too easily these days, but hey – it’s good to let off steam now and then. There – rant over. For a little while at least!

Harbottle Castle

Start reading about castles and strange words start to bounce off the page as you carry on reading. Then you get to the end of the passage and if you are like me, ask yourself, “What did that actually tell me?”

The words are so specialised that no one but architects, and historians with a modicum of curiosity about old buildings will ever understand them. Authors can get tangled up in words like Gothic, Keeps, Tracery and Barbicans. I did, and I’ve spent the last two days digging around in the literature about medieval castles in an effort to understand.

Tracery, for example. It is intersecting ribwork in the upper part of a window. It can be used decoratively in blank arches, on vaults, etc. And that’s not all. Plate tracery is an early form where decoratively shaped openings are cut through the solid stone infilling in a window head. Bar tracery, introduced into England around 1250, where intersecting ribwork made up of slender shafts continuing the lines of the mullions of the windows up to a decorative mesh in the head of the window. Lost yet? I hope not, for we still must consider Geometrical tracery, Y tracery, Intersecting tracery, Reticulated tracery, Panel tracery and Perp tracery. Oh, and mustn’t forget Dagger tracery, Kentish or Split Cusp, and the intriguingly named Mouchette, a leaf shape which lies flauntingly off to one side.

Ignore these words at your peril. Gothic windows are defined by their pointed arches, yes, but then there was the tracery.
I spent a happy day on Sunday prowling around Harbottle Castle in Coquetdale. A brilliant day, a lovely drive full of autumn colours, and a four mile walk beside the Coquet to round off the afternoon. The Castle had - you’ve guessed it! – at least one Gothic window, because remnants of the tracery have been found among the fallen stones at the bottom of the motte.

Tomorrow I shall hastily go through my already written pages and redesign my version of Harbottle Castle, ignoring the fact that my hero languishes in an upper story where a fire has broken out. Time to rescue him when I've sorted ou the windows.

And then, of course, there are all those other details I've discovered about the gate towers, the drawbridge. and the well in the inner bailey. I didn't know there was a drawbridge when I wrote the chapter!

Fantasy land

Two silver horses drew me to the edge of the water while dh examined the Falkirk Wheel (more of which later). As I edged around looking for the best shot without said wheel dominating the horse sculptures, I noticed the panda in the background. Yes, a panda. A panda looking as if s/he is pleading with a higher authority about something. I include a blow up taken from the original to prove it. What the story was there I haven't a clue, but somebody, somewhere, ought to incorporate it into a novel. Along with the horses, of course.

I had a really good moment today on visiting Blackwells bookshop in Newcastle. My book was there on the shelf for all the world to see. In the A-Z section, along with author C J Sansom, whose wonderful Tudor-set stories I've recently read. Really good historical novels, though I've seen them shelved in the crime section. The hero, lawyer Matthew Shardlake, solves a crime, sometimes two crimes in one story, but the world he inhabits and moves through is chillingly Tudor.

I recognised some of the "set scenes" he uses from my own research, and sighed, wondering if that meant I couldn't or shouldn't use the same pieces. Or if I could, as long as I presented it a little differently. After all, a piece taken from original documents of the 1540's is almost an event, and can be used over and over, just as Anne Boleyn's execution "happens" in more than a few stories of the time.

The BBC promises a new history website in 2011 and I'll certainly be on the look-out for that. THIS is the link if you're interested.

Stirling Castle

My fictional heroes Harry and Matho are heading for Stirling and I'm wishing I could up sticks and mooch around the place myself. It isn't that far, well within a day's journey, but it isn't the best move in the world for me right now. I'm making do with a guide published by Historic Scotland bought for one penny via the internet. I love using maps and diagrams for this sort of thing, especially historical maps, and the web is just great as a research tool.

I did attend a dinner in Stirling Castle once, right after the Great Hall had been newly refurbished as it must have been when first built in the 1540's. It was part of the Dorothy Dunnett weekend conference and over 300 people turned up and filled the hall. On the way from Edinburgh to Stirling, our bus broke down. Wouldn't you know it? Other buses had arrived on time, and we were desperately late by the time a replacement bus turned up and completed the journey. We were met and whisked up and into the Great Hall with no time to look around. They handed us our champagne as we entered the door! I didn't reget the lack of time then, as everything was so exciting, and we had a wondeful evening, but I do now.