Many summers ago, I had the good fortune to take a trip to see the ancient stones and monuments of Argyll with my daughter Lauren when she was studying History of Art at Edinburgh and developed an interest in ancient stones and all things medieval.
Our favourite site was Temple Wood, an intriguing stone circle in a magical place even if your name doesn’t have Celtic origins. It simply begged to be written about, and Midsummer Glen was the result.
It is title number three in the Seasonal Disorders series, all based on paranormal tales linked to the four seasons. The story is an apocalyptic tale of what could happen when ancient myths intersect with modern realities. Still in keeping with my penchant for historical fiction, the timeline has now moved into the 1930s – the June in 1939, to be precise, on the eve of the phoney war. It revolves some mysterious standing stones, the Nether Largie group, in fact, not far from Oban. Dunadd Castle also features, and when I was last there, I heard cuckoos calling … It was strangely haunting.
The main character is a tribute to my late father, Peter A.W. Kelt, who really did work as a hedge-cutter one vacation in Dumfriesshire. He studied geography, rather than geology, and lost a brother when he was very young. Some of the classical references in the story are also real, but I have taken some mischievous liberties.
The first of three chapters is available free tomorrow on this blog.
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