To celebrate the release of Strangeness and Charm in the UK, I thought I would follow up my previous post with some more on the church at Kilpeck. in Herefordshire. I said in my post, Publication Day: Strangeness and Charm, that while he outside of the church was fascinating, the inside held even more surprises….
Category: History
Publication Day: Strangeness and Charm
The 29th May is the official US publication day for Strangeness and Charm, the third in the series The Courts of the Feyre, and it’s cause for celebration here at Shevdon Manor. For your delectation, the kind folk at Angry Robot Books have posted a sample for you to whet your appetite upon, which I hope will…
The Devil’s Arrows
While writing The Road to Bedlam, there were a number of things that I wanted to achieve. First and foremost I wanted to continue the story of Niall and Blackbird from where they were left at the end of Sixty-One Nails, and show the impact the events in that book had on their lives. This…
Global Cooling
Here in the UK, the cold weather is finally upon us. Cold air over continental Europe will, this week, hold back the giant anti-cyclones out in the Atlantic and result in cold and frosty mornings – at least that’s the forecast. When one lives in Britain, one gets used to the weather being a subject…
Temple and the Templars
Regular visitors to these pages will by now be familiar with the Ceremony of the Quit Rents and some of the rituals and artefacts associated with the ceremony, in particular the six horse shoes and sixty-one nails referred to in the newly released novel, which is for a forge in Tweezers Alley, just south of…
Red-Light District in a Convent Garden
One of the main locations in SIxty-One Nails is Covent Garden Market. Blackbird brings Niall here after they first meet to purchase a token gift before they descend beneath the streets into the hidden world of Gramawl and Kareesh. When they emerge into the plaza, she turns to him…. “Oh, I’ve missed this. It’s one…
Quit Rents Ceremony 2009
Those of you who follow these postings will know about the Quit Rent Ceremony. For the uninitiated, this is the oldest legal ceremony in England apart from the coronation. It involves the rendering of two medieval quit rents which date back to the thirteenth century. The first is for land known as The Moors near…