"All the people of Abbotsbury, including the vicar, are thieves, smugglers and plunderers of wrecks."
The London Journal, 1752
This is the view of Abbotsbury that will appear on the book cover.
Synopsis
Katharine (Kat) Moorhouse is a quiet, mature 14-year-old girl interested in history and nature. She was only a baby when her mother, a musicologist from New Zealand, died in a car crash on a research trip.
After she develops a crush on one of her female classmates, Kat is subjected to a vicious bullying campaign that leaves her seriously shaken and heartbroken; hence her relief when her father decides to move away from London and finds them a cottage in Abbotsbury, a small Dorset village. The young girl soon feels at ease in her new environment and falls in love with the county’s ancestral landscape, guided by her best friend Joe, a local boy with family issues of his own. Kat is particularly drawn to St Catherine’s chapel with which she shares her name.
One evening, on Chapel Hill, she meets a mysterious woman, also called Catherine (Cathy), who works for a local elderly gentleman, Ronald Sinclair, misanthrope, Sherlock Holmes enthusiast and senior member of the Nietzsche Appreciation Society.
The origins of Sir Ron’s family are rather dubious and the stuff of legend in an area historically linked to smuggling and shipwrecking activities.
As Kat’s relationship with Catherine develops and the motivation behind the older woman’s befriending of the girl is revealed, the latter finds herself at the same time fascinated and repulsed by her new acquaintance and understands that nothing is what it seems in this seemingly idyllic part of England…
After she develops a crush on one of her female classmates, Kat is subjected to a vicious bullying campaign that leaves her seriously shaken and heartbroken; hence her relief when her father decides to move away from London and finds them a cottage in Abbotsbury, a small Dorset village. The young girl soon feels at ease in her new environment and falls in love with the county’s ancestral landscape, guided by her best friend Joe, a local boy with family issues of his own. Kat is particularly drawn to St Catherine’s chapel with which she shares her name.
One evening, on Chapel Hill, she meets a mysterious woman, also called Catherine (Cathy), who works for a local elderly gentleman, Ronald Sinclair, misanthrope, Sherlock Holmes enthusiast and senior member of the Nietzsche Appreciation Society.
The origins of Sir Ron’s family are rather dubious and the stuff of legend in an area historically linked to smuggling and shipwrecking activities.
As Kat’s relationship with Catherine develops and the motivation behind the older woman’s befriending of the girl is revealed, the latter finds herself at the same time fascinated and repulsed by her new acquaintance and understands that nothing is what it seems in this seemingly idyllic part of England…
Below is the cover artwork by Sam Cannon, a Dorset-based artist.
This is a specially commissioned artwork!
Find her work on her website HERE.
This is a specially commissioned artwork!
Find her work on her website HERE.
Cover artwork by Sam Cannon Art - www.samcannonart.co.uk
Provisional cover - we are still working on the font!
All photos (c) Matt ArtPix
WHY DORSET?
It is not easy to describe, even for a writer, the kind of feeling you get when you are out there, standing in a landscape that hasn't been changed nor spoilt for hundreds - even thousands of years. You feel like you are in a timeless place, a place in which Nature has always had the upper hand. You feel at peace.
It is the best of places for a writer: Dorset can give you beauty and danger, placid hills and uncompromising cliffs, chocolate-box villages and atmospheric manor houses, but also isolated, ruined ghost villages and wind-swept 14th-Century chapels.
It offers you a much needed quiet and allows you to retreat inside yourself, your thoughts at last unpolluted by the increasingly attention-seeking outside world.
The countryside is lush, abundant and extremely varied. It is full of animals and feels incredibly alive.
You feel linked to the past and the future and tend to reflect on the place of human beings on this earth, especially when you look at the breathtaking Jurassic coast or at the imperious ruins of Corfe Castle. If you have an ounce of imagination, then hundreds of images appear in front of your eyes and you make up stories in your head at the pace of at least 100 per hour.
No wonder the area has got links to literature and the arts. It is one of the most inspiring places I have been to.
Now for one of my favourite places in South Dorset: St Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury.
We saw it under a blue sky with the sun shining. I have seen it in the autumn on a stormy day. I want to go back and see it in the winter...
The 14th century chapel is located on top of a hill, overlooking the incredible Chesil beach. It is thought that after the Dissolution, the chapel was used as a beacon, or sea-mark, and this is what saved it from destruction.
I will be adding smugglers to the themes treated in the book, inspired by real-life historical individuals and events!
Incidentally, St Catherine's chapel has inspired PJ Harvey's song "The Wind".
Catherine liked high places
High up on the hills
A place for making noises
Noises like the whales
Here she built a chapel with
Her image on the wall
A place where she could rest and
A place where she could wash
And listen to the wind blow
She dreamt of children's voices
And torture on the wheel
Patron-Saint of nothing
A woman of the hills
She once was a lady
Of pleasure, and high-born
A lady of the city
But now she sits and moans
And listens to the wind blow
I see her in her chapel
High up on a hill
She must be so lonely
Oh Mother, can't we give
A husband to our Catherine?
A handsome one, a dear
A rich one for the lady
Someone to listen with
PJ Harvey, The Wind
It is not easy to describe, even for a writer, the kind of feeling you get when you are out there, standing in a landscape that hasn't been changed nor spoilt for hundreds - even thousands of years. You feel like you are in a timeless place, a place in which Nature has always had the upper hand. You feel at peace.
It is the best of places for a writer: Dorset can give you beauty and danger, placid hills and uncompromising cliffs, chocolate-box villages and atmospheric manor houses, but also isolated, ruined ghost villages and wind-swept 14th-Century chapels.
It offers you a much needed quiet and allows you to retreat inside yourself, your thoughts at last unpolluted by the increasingly attention-seeking outside world.
The countryside is lush, abundant and extremely varied. It is full of animals and feels incredibly alive.
You feel linked to the past and the future and tend to reflect on the place of human beings on this earth, especially when you look at the breathtaking Jurassic coast or at the imperious ruins of Corfe Castle. If you have an ounce of imagination, then hundreds of images appear in front of your eyes and you make up stories in your head at the pace of at least 100 per hour.
No wonder the area has got links to literature and the arts. It is one of the most inspiring places I have been to.
Now for one of my favourite places in South Dorset: St Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury.
We saw it under a blue sky with the sun shining. I have seen it in the autumn on a stormy day. I want to go back and see it in the winter...
The 14th century chapel is located on top of a hill, overlooking the incredible Chesil beach. It is thought that after the Dissolution, the chapel was used as a beacon, or sea-mark, and this is what saved it from destruction.
I will be adding smugglers to the themes treated in the book, inspired by real-life historical individuals and events!
Incidentally, St Catherine's chapel has inspired PJ Harvey's song "The Wind".
Catherine liked high places
High up on the hills
A place for making noises
Noises like the whales
Here she built a chapel with
Her image on the wall
A place where she could rest and
A place where she could wash
And listen to the wind blow
She dreamt of children's voices
And torture on the wheel
Patron-Saint of nothing
A woman of the hills
She once was a lady
Of pleasure, and high-born
A lady of the city
But now she sits and moans
And listens to the wind blow
I see her in her chapel
High up on a hill
She must be so lonely
Oh Mother, can't we give
A husband to our Catherine?
A handsome one, a dear
A rich one for the lady
Someone to listen with
PJ Harvey, The Wind
The Right Place playlist...
Click on the artists' name to go to their website and on the track name to listen/watch.
PJ Harvey - The Wind
The Eden House - The Tempest
New Model Army - High
Jordan Reyne - The Proximity of Death
Jo Quail - Adder Stone
Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below
The Mighty Sieben - A Firebug Nature
Joolz and Mik Davis - Mother of Sorrow
Crowstone - Lower Hope Reach
Raf and O - Strange
Click on the artists' name to go to their website and on the track name to listen/watch.
PJ Harvey - The Wind
The Eden House - The Tempest
New Model Army - High
Jordan Reyne - The Proximity of Death
Jo Quail - Adder Stone
Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below
The Mighty Sieben - A Firebug Nature
Joolz and Mik Davis - Mother of Sorrow
Crowstone - Lower Hope Reach
Raf and O - Strange
My reading list
Before I start working in earnest on The Right Place, I will need to get myself in the mood.
The following books will be on my shelf:
Holloway and The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
Some Thomas Hardy
The Secret Places of West Dorset and More Secret Places of West Dorset by Louise Hodgson
Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner
Dorset Smugglers by Roger Guttridge
The Little Book of Dorset by David Hilliam
The following books will be on my shelf:
Holloway and The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
Some Thomas Hardy
The Secret Places of West Dorset and More Secret Places of West Dorset by Louise Hodgson
Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner
Dorset Smugglers by Roger Guttridge
The Little Book of Dorset by David Hilliam
