What
do 1976, 1984 and 2018 have in common? Along with a few other
occasions, these are years when the Haweswater reservoir in Cumbria
has dried out so much that the ruins of a village are exposed.
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| Haweswater in drought, 2018. Image copyright Jennifer Young |
Mardale
Green was demolished in the 1930s to make way for the reservoir,
which is the main source of water for Manchester. A dam was built,
and the small lake that had graced the valley expanded. A whole
community was lost – farms, homes, roads, a church and a pub.
The
villagers were compensated, but all had to move out after the dam was
built , to see their homes destroyed and then lost beneath the water.
Even the dead were moved – graves in the churchyard were exhumed
and reburied elsewhere.
When
the reservoir dries out, the remains of walls are revealed, the
outlines of cottages, dry stone walls marking old field boundaries,
rusty iron gates. There’s even an intact stone bridge, that crossed
the stream that ran through the valley, revealed when the water drops
low enough.
I’m
a long-time lover of the Lake District, and visited Haweswater in the
spring of 2016, when the reservoir was full and the valley at its
most beautiful. There was snow on the mountain tops and the previous
year’s brown bracken on the slopes. Downstream of the dam the
fields were lush and green, filled with the season’s new lambs.
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| Hiking up the Old Corpse Road above Haweswater, the inspiration for my novel The Drowned Village |
We
parked in the car park at the top end of the reservoir. There’s a
faded information board there about the history of the valley, and as
I was reading it my friend said to me, ‘Hey, Kath, you could write
a novel about this!’
For
the rest of the day that was all I could think about, and by the time
we came down from the mountains I had the beginnings of a story idea
in my head. What if, my novelist’s brain suggested, a
secret was hidden in the village, lost when the valley was flooded,
only to resurface in a drought year? Something
important, something that would resolve an ancient mystery...
That
idea eventually became my novel The Drowned Village, which was
published by HarperCollins in September 2018. I seem to have
predicted the summer’s drought – my friends are all now asking me
for next week’s lottery numbers.
It’s
not the only time life has imitated art, or at least, imitated the
plot of my books. In my first book, The Emerald Comb, an
ancient skeleton is revealed when a tree blows down in a storm. A
year or so after publication, a friend sent me a link to an article
about how a thousand-year old skeleton was revealed when a tree fell
down in County Sligo, Ireland.
Hmm,
what will come true next, I wonder? Let’s see, what’s in my next
book...
