Deja Vue

I have several times had the slightly eerie experience of going to a place and thinking that I'd been there before, and of course I had- in my mind; transported there by writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Virgina Woolfe, Malcolm Lowry- and Kathleen Herbert! Kathleen's research was meticulous, which is why she can bring her settings to life. The link below will take you to an interview with her in which she explains her working methods:

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/herbert.htm

Some further sites where you can see some of the locations from Moon in Leo:

Frith Hall in Dunnerdale, the isolated hunting lodge where heroine Rosamund is kept as a prisoner:

She escapes over the fells to Coniston Hall


The quicksands of the River Leven in Morecambe Bay are a pervasive and sinister presence in the book, and they continue to be a present day danger. Who can forget the fate of those poor Chinese cockle pickers in 2004?

Towards the end of this video there is a chilling evocation of Kathleen's words as we watch a man being swallowed by the "toothless mouth" of the quicksands:

I plan to make a trip to the Furness Peninsula in the near future, to track Rosamund's travels and take photos, which I will post on this blog.