By Marsh and by Moor
Maps from 1809
Proof-reading now finished for By Marsh and by Moor, my next release!
Jed Trevithick, able seaman, has just escaped from the Royal Navy, and he's determined never to return. But the war against Napoleon is never-ending, and Naval press gangs scour the coast, looking for cannon fodder.
He meets Solomon Dyer, a London ostler who has his own reasons for avoiding the press gang. Together, they flee across the countryside, quickly coming to rely on each other to survive—and tumbling into bed together soon afterwards.
But Jed still bears the scars from his time in the Navy, and Solomon's secret may be the very thing that puts him in danger again.
This is the point at which, among other things, I double-check dates and places. Most fortunately for me, the Ordnance Survey was busy mapping England during this period, and in 1809, almost exactly the year in which By Marsh and by Moor is set, they released maps of the region Jed and Solomon travel across!
It was very cool to have those maps by me as I wrote, and to see the landscape they cross, sometimes the same and sometimes so different from the geography we know today. (For instance, the River Huntspill in Somerset didn’t even exist yet!)
I was also confronted once more with how many damned placenames there are in this book that begin with the letter ‘B’. Barnstaple, Bridgwater, Burrowbridge, Braunton, Brean, Bath, Bristol… Argh! Nothing worse than having to read about Bess who goes to Bristol via Bridgwater while Bob and Bill are in Bath.
But I could hardly send poor Jed and Solomon around the long way just so they could go through places that don’t begin with ‘B’. Nor travel back in time a thousand years and ask the Anglo Saxons to very kindly rename some of their settlements…
I suppose I could have copied Thomas Hardy and just renamed various towns to suit myself. But I feel like the fictional placenames in Hardy’s Wessex are part of his romantic idealisation of a pastoral dream, and… yeah, not really the vibe I’m going for.
Anyway, I’m now drafting Books 2 and 3 in the same trilogy.