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Margaret has won or been placed in quite a number of short
story competitions including Neil Gunn, Fish, Mslexia, Historical Novel Society.
She now loves writing full length fiction and was thrilled to be awarded the
Beryl Bainbridge Best First Time Author Award for her debut novel, Turn of the
Tide.
Turn of the Tide
Set in 16th Century Scotland Munro owes allegiance to the Cunninghames and to the Earl of Glencairn. Trapped in the 150-year-old feud between the Cunninghames and the Montgomeries, he escapes the bloody aftermath of an ambush, but he cannot escape the disdain of the wife he sought to protect, or his own internal conflict. He battles with his conscience and with divided loyalties and to age-old obligations, to his wife and children, and, most dangerous of all, to a growing friendship with the rival Montgomerie clan. Intervening to diffuse a quarrel that flares between a Cunninghame cousin and Hugh Montgomerie, he succeeds only in antagonizing William, the arrogant and vicious Cunninghame heir. And antagonizing William is a dangerous game to play...
A House Divided
The sequel to Turn of the Tide, it continues
the story of the fictional Munro family, trapped in a notorious vendetta in
16th century Scotland.
Eleven years on from the Massacre of
Annock, the Cunninghame / Montgomerie
truce is fragile. For the Munro family, living in hiding
under assumed names, these are dangerous times.
While Munro risks his life daily in the
service of the French King, the spectre of discovery by William Cunninghame
haunts his wife Kate. Her fears for their children and her absent husband
realized as William’s desire for revenge tears their world apart.
A sweeping tale of compassion and cruelty,
treachery and sacrifice, set against the backdrop of feuding clans, a religious
war, and the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1597.
*****
I'm delighted that Margaret has chosen to share her love of Scotland with us .....
Confession time. Although my main focus at
the moment is writing Scottish historical fiction, I’m not a Scot. And despite having been married to a Scot for
36 years and having lived in Scotland for 33 of those 36, I’m still regarded as
a ‘blow-in’ ie a foreigner. (In case
you’re counting, I was a child bride, well, close anyway).
But my
love of Scotland goes much further back than my marriage – right back in fact
to a caravanning holiday when I was 12. How could I forget my dad trying to
negotiate Highland roads - single track with passing places almost long enough
for the average car - while towing a caravan. Taking a wrong turn meant
unhitching the caravan to turn it by hand while a stream of long-suffering
locals built up behind us.
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| Passing Place |
As an adult I appreciate the grandeur of the mountains and the fabulous scenery. As a child it was the silence that captivated me: the eerie atmosphere of the remote valleys, the dark lochs lying silent and undisturbed brooded over by ruinous castles that set my imagination aflame and sent me scurrying to my local library to devour every book I could find, both fiction and non- fiction, that focused on Scotland. From Mary Queen of Scots to Montrose, from the Highland Clearances to the Massacre of Glencoe, from Macbeth to Bonnie Prince Charlie, heroes and villains, I loved them all.
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| Loch Awe |
But neither of my novels – Turn of the Tide and its forthcoming
sequel A House Divided feature kilted highlanders, or indeed any of the
iconic figures of Scottish history. Instead I have chosen to focus on a period
and people and places that most readers won’t have heard of before. How I came
to focus on the ‘Ayrshire Vendetta’, a 150 year feud between two families in
South-West Scotland, is another story, one which has its roots in Ulster, not
Scotland, but to a large extent it is the setting of the Scottish Borders that
inspires and informs my writing.
My
main character, Munro, is a minor laird, and it wasn’t hard to find a prototype
for his house, for the area in which I live is littered with tower houses –
rather gaunt and forbidding dwellings, built more for defence than comfort and
generally in inaccessible positions. Munro’s home is an amalgam of the two
closest to me – Greenknowe, though ruinous, retains enough of the walls to
provide an interesting exterior - it is the basis for the cover of my second
book.
Greenknowe
Smailholm is complete and allowed me
to experience what it would be like to sit by the fireside in the hall, or peer
out through the narrow window slits; how much breath it takes to climb up the
slope to the tower, or to run up the spiral stair. It gave me the length and
breadth and particularly the height of rooms, a sense both of the narrowness of
their existence and the pleasure that the rare opportunity to sit at leisure
within the shelter of the barmkin on a sunny day might provide.
A major feature of the history of our area
is the legacy of the reivers – this
panel, part of the Great Tapestry of Scotland, which I was privileged to help
stitch - illustrates a core feature of
their lifestyle. Violent men for whom family and loyalty were all important,
they rode out on wild, windy nights to steal sheep and rustle cattle from their
neighbours … and worse. Suffice it to say the words ‘bereave’ and ‘blackmail’
have their origins in the reivers’ activities.
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| Reivers from the Great Tapestry of Scotland |
Nowadays
each town has a festival centred around rideouts to out-lying villages and
places of particular significance. Large numbers of riders, in some cases as
many as 400, take part and those elected as festival principals must lead all
the rides. One of my earliest memories of moving to the Borders is of standing
in a field on the edge of a village, hearing the distant thunder of hooves and
watching as around 130 horses and riders appeared over the brow of the hill,
heading straight for us. Hardly surprising then that, although the
majority of my characters are historical, Munro, my fictional main character,
rode into my head one day on his mare, Sweet Briar, almost a character in her
own right.
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| Common Riding |
The landscape of the Borders is just as
beautiful and as wild as the Highlands, though on a smaller scale.
Our hills are rolling, punctured by
outcrops of rock, smothered in spring and summer by a riot of colour as first
gorse and then heather springs into bloom. The moors are bleak, lonely places,
criss-crossed by hidden streams and boggy ground making it treacherous
underfoot for travellers whether on horse or foot.
While I was training for a charity walk on
the Great Wall of China I spent many days walking the Eildons, rough terrain
that gave me a real feel for what travel in the 16th century would have
been like.
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| Gorse |
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| Eildons |
Some of the action in both my novels takes
place in Edinburgh and I’m fortunate that it is only just over an hour’s drive
from me. Some of my most enjoyable research involved wandering up and down the
Royal Mile, where if I closed my eyes I could imagine the street lined with
luckenbooths* and hear the stall-holders
crying their wares. And if I needed a little extra help in that I could visit
Mary King’s Close– part of the medieval city, buried under the existing town,
and Gladstone’s Land – a merchant’s house of
the period. It was in Gladstone’s Land that I found a medieval baby-walker,
almost identical to the one I had for my own children, except that it was
wooden rather than metal. That was a detail that I just had to fit into my
story somehow!
*Luckenbooths are covered booths or stalls which can be
locked.
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| Mary King's Close |
One of
the tasks of an historical novelist when writing about people who actually
existed is to find out as much information from the historical records as
possible about them. In my first novel I broke that rule when writing about one
character about whom I knew very little, yet instinctively making him one of my
primary villains. Imagine my excitement when, during the editing process, I
went to his home, Newark castle, to check what could be seen from the
windows of the Great Hall, and
discovered that in real life he was much more villainous than I had painted
him, having gained notoriety as a wife-beater. That really was a ‘eukeka’
moment.
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| Newark Castle |
I have travelled to many of the locations
in my novels, scrambling up to stumps of castles, driving the routes that my
characters take as the action unfolds, stopping wherever and whenever I can to
take pictures to pin up on my notice board to refresh my memory as I write. But
landscape isn’t a static thing and many
features change over time: river courses alter, deepen in some places, silt up
in others, so an additional challenge is to try to understand what a landscape might
have looked like all those years ago. In my second novel my main character
hides in a cave system beside a river, but these are now some 12 metres above
the water due to the excavation of the gorge by the river.
Though
nothing can beat visiting the locations in my books, it isn’t always possible
and when I can’t get to a particular location I spend hours pouring over maps,
both modern and ancient – particular favourites are those drawn by Timothy
Pont, many of which survive in the National Library of Scotland. It is Pont’s
map of Ayrshire that forms the basis for the maps in the front of both my
novels, and I’m grateful to the NLS for giving their permission.
Living in such an atmospheric and lovely
environment, perhaps it’s not surprising that the part of writing I most enjoy
is description, even of weather – and in Scotland we certainly get plenty of
that!
All photographs by kind permission ©Margaret Skea
*****
