The Landscape that Inspired Nightjar
Over the last week and two I have released my first novel out into the world. 'Nightjar' is a literary fantasy set in a feudal future, where magic lives in the woods and a flooded world is become cruel. It is in part adventure, horror, and romance. A tale that draws inspiration from both future and past, uses the old adage of 'what will be has already been', and is given life by a landscape and history that still lives along the Greensand Ridge; in-between the village of Everton and town of Sandy.
It is a place of low escarpment and wooded hill above a sea that once was.
Long ago, in pre-history.
When you walk the base of the ridge along the lie of an old Roman Road, it is easy to reimagine the flooded plains of a shallow sea; particularly now with the threat of global warming and rising sea levels. And the hills are as islands.
Dark.
Wooded and ancient.
Once they were the home of blue-painted tribes, pagan and magic. Hill forts dot the area. At the RSPB and overlooking the town of Sandy. There lies 'Caesar's Hill', 'Caesar's Fort', 'the Lookout'; a place of many names and no less beautiful for it. It looks out across Sandy and the low ground that once was sea. A place of sand and oak where druids did walk and old Gods lived. In the times of the Roman Empire it is easy to picture a contour fort, no doubt resplendent with palisade and sentry; found fragments of history still on display in the local council offices. Later still came the Vikings, the rail, the road, and with the coming of steam and smoke, cars and exhaust, the old Roman Way that ran between Everton and Sandy was largely forgot; reclaimed by nature.
Is still being reclaimed.
And it is this landscape that inspired me, a man of maddened means, to pen 'Nightjar'.
Nightjar is now available to purchase on Amazon as a Kindle eBook, to buy or to borrow if you are a member of Kindle Unlimited, and now as a paperback.
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