July 14th, 2011, Shrewsbury: Walking On The Wild Side

For those of you within reach of Shrewsbury, something for the diary - an author-led tour of Shrewsbury, next week on Thursday 14th July.  

What's wild about the beautiful county town of rural Shropshire, you might ask - especially looking at this photo?  Well, there's Beck's Field for a start, and the old town walls have their wild moments, and so does the mighty River Severn, but my free-range imagination can be pretty wild as well!  

Join me on a walk through the Pengwern of my 'Children of Plynlimon' novels, and discover some of the places I brought to life in 'Sabrina Fludde' and 'The Red Judge'.  

Contact details for making a booking can be found through Mary.McKenzie@shropshire.gov.uk

River Severn, Wild Children, Myths & Legends, Sabrina Fludde

I’ve been told that there are only a handful of railway stations in the world which are built over rivers.  If that’s the case, my local station is one of them.  I walk beneath it every morning.  Its underbelly is a riot of girders, arches and massive pillars planted ten-square in the bed of the River Severn.  Pigeons look down and coo as I pass beneath.  They have their homes up there in the darkness.  However far the sun may penetrate, there are corners of that bridge where it never reaches.

A few years ago I imagined children living up there amongst those girders, inhabiting a hidden limbo-land between railway station and river - wild, homeless children whose only connection with the outside world was to watch it pass beneath them on the towing path or hear it thundering on the rails overhead.  That was the beginning of my novel ‘Sabrina Fludde...

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A Weird Story, But True

My dentist is a conjuror. Perhaps sitting in his surgery this morning is what brought Doctor Katterfelto back to mind. A number of years ago, I was writing a book called 'The Red Judge', whose villain was a conjuror too. Whilst researching the history of the subject I came across an eighteenth century practitioner who went by the name of Doctor Katterfelto. His tricks were just the sort I imagined the conjuror in my book playing, and his personality was just as extrovert, so I wrote him in and thought no more...

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