Seasonal promotions are hitting all the digital stores, including my Torc of Moonlight Trilogy
boxed set. For a very limited period this 900+ page fantasy romance is a
mere £2.99 / €2.99 / $2.99 or equivalent. Go grab it now and feast on more than just turkey this festive season.
The
over-arcing story follows Nick and Alice through three books, three cities skirting the wild lands of the North York Moors, three time periods, and nine
years - those numbers are significant to the storyline - as the pair grapple with the realisation that Celtic folklore is based
very much on living fact.
I tripped over the premise, or should I say I kept
tripping over it, as I undertook various walks along ancient byways in
my home county of Yorkshire. History might be buried, but it's not
always dead, and TV programmes like Time Team and Digging For Britain now emphasise how people lived as well as marvelling at the physical traces they left for archaeologists to excavate.
Unpolluted drinking water is a commodity humans have always taken care to secure. Today it's chemically scrubbed
and piped into our homes; in Victorian times the village pump helped to
keep clean the water from the local spring; before the mechanical pump, the
spring itself would be surrounded by a stone well-head to help retain
the purity of its water with its run-off allowed to pool in the
ubiquitous village pond. It is here The White Lady, protector of the water, is found under the sub-heading "folklore" in county histories written by altruistic country gentlemen.
The
White Lady was no mere ghostly form in previous centuries, but she was
always female. The traditional Well-Dressing festivals of Derbyshire,
rich in Christian symbolism, are an attempt to conflate and thus
suppress the belief. The same was attempted in the medieval period where
stone churches dedicated to All Saints or All Souls were built close to
springs venerated at the end of the farming calendar - the Celtic
year-end festival of Samhain demonised by Christian teaching into All
Hallows. Despite now being a largely secular country, we still refuse to let go.
Halloween is the most commercialised "festival" next to Christmas.
If you like the works of Barbara Erskine, Robert Holdstock, or Phil Rickman, the Torc of Moonlight Trilogy may well be your cup of Yuletide pleasure. It is on offer for a limited time only:
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