Well, this is the last #HistFicThursday blog before I launch Beneath A Darkening Sky at an event in Thurso on Monday 13th . Shame it couldn't be a Friday 13th, but we can't have everything! One thing is for certain: October is the spookiest month. And not just because we have Halloween. Halloween could be a day later and October would still be the spookiest month... Look at how the light retreats at this time of the year: up here, the seasons' turning drains away the daylight at a rate of 2.5hours over the course of this month! Up here, anyway. Our ancestors knew, a long time before they tracked time using clocks, that this month we now call October was a time to look back at what has been and ahead to how we will survive the winter. Is it any wonder then that, with generations of people looking back, October became a month for souls and spectres? People we have loved and lost come back to visit our hearts, imaginations - and, perhaps, our homes - as we recall autumns of ...
Later this year, a Ravenser Odd exhibition will be shared at Cleethorpes and Grimsby, not far from where the ill-fated island was situated. Last year, I was delighted to chat with Emily, whose PhD has been instrumental in the research and promotion of Yorkshire's Atlantis, and we talked about how the island had inspired this story, adding to the cultural evolution of the legend of of Ravenser Odd. It's a long read, but I hope you enjoy it... Ravenser Odd I had lived all of my fifteen years in Ravenser Odd. In my earliest memories it had been a busy town, the docks lined with ships of all sizes, carrying garments and foods from the mystical continent beyond the mouth of the Humber. Then, aboard one of those ships, arrived the plague. Forced to anchor at the toll on the peninsula, the ship had paid a deadly tax upon Ravenser Odd, carrying away half its population on the riptide of the Black Death. When the low-lying land had flooded, forcing out many of the surviving inhabi...