The Complete Dartmoor Pegasus

Well, that's the first story of the year finished, and very easy it was too: I wrote it on my 'phone one night when I couldn't sleep, and then Sarah McIntyre slaved away for hours and hours turning it into twelve beautifully illustrated episodes. You can read the whole thing on her blog (and she's also written about the pony books she loved as a child, and included many photos of her small equestrian self).

We had a lot of fun coming up with this! Hopefully it won't be the last we'll see of Kevin - we're just taking a breather while we decide what his next adventure should involve.

The Dartmoor Pegasus

I don't usually like to have my own pictures on display, but this little fat Pegasus which I painted on a bit of Brighton driftwood sometime in the late 1980s has been on the wall of every house I've lived in since; it's above the kitchen door here at Bonehill...

This Christmas I made a clay version of it for Sarah, and when Sarah McIntyre saw it, she thought it would be a good thing to base some drawings on.

So we've written a short story together, which will be appearing in installments over the next few weeks: just keep an eye on McIntyre's blog, or follow @jabberworks on Twitter or Instagram for updates. Here's the first installment:

My First Walk on Dartmoor

Posting that piece about Dartmoor a few weeks ago reminded me of these old slides, which show my first visit here, in the summer of 1967, when I was about 18 months old. I'm not sure which part of the moor these were taken on, but I know my parents were staying in Plymouth, and were getting around by public transport, so I presume it's somewhere over on the south west corner.  I don't remember anything about that holiday, though I remember some of the stuff; my sister inherited the pushchair and the blue quilty anorak, and I think I was still using the grey rucksack when I started college.

For nice images of the moor (and my knees) 47 years on, check out Sarah's instagrams.

Back on the Moor

After a week spent running around Manchester and London like a blue-lipsticked fly, it was nice to get back to Dartmoor. Sometimes it's easy to forget that the main reason I started illustrating and writing books was so that I could live here...

Back in the early '90s when Sarah and I still lived in Brighton, we only used to get one week per year on the moor. It was usually the third or fourth week in September, and we always used to stay in the same place, at Wooder Manor, just outside Widecombe, where farmers William and Angela Bell have converted some of their outbuildings into cosy holiday lets. (If you ever think of exploring Dartmoor for yourself, Wooder is an excellent base.)

Photo: woodermanor.com

We were staying there when I started writing Mortal Engines, and when I needed a family name for my hero I just looked out of the window, and called him after nearby Natsworthy*, where a line of grand old beech trees comes down to the road.

But eventually we got tired of going home after our holidays, so I started illustrating full-time so that we could move here (I can't drive, so if I was going to live in the country, I had to have a job that I could do from home)**. We've lived on the moor for almost sixteen years now, and for the past seven we've been William and Angela's neighbours, just across the valley from Wooder.

Last night Sam was on a sleepover with some friends, so Sarah and I had the rare chance to go for an evening walk together.  We left the car at Natsworthy and walked up over Hameldown to the ancient settlement at Grimspound. Here are a few pictures which I snapped on my phone...

Someone had pitched a tent in the circle of the old wall at Grimpsound, which must be a wonderful place to camp, but in this picture I've carefully positioned Sarah to block it out.

Hookney Tor catching some low evening sunbeams.

Not a menhir, I think, just an old gatepost in a fallen wall.

...and here's a rather better one which Sarah took with her camera (she's a proper photographer). 

Photo: Sarah Reeve

*Actually, now I know the lie of the land a bit better, I don't think you can see Natsworthy from Wooder Manor - it must have been some other line of trees that I was looking at. But I thought it was Natsworthy.

** Or I could have LEARNED TO DRIVE, I suppose - for some reason I never thought of that.

A Walk on Hameldown

Last week, in between downpours, I took the dog for a quick walk up the hill outside the village...

I hadn't planned to go far, but when I reached the top it was so nice in the wind and the autumn sunshine that I kept going. I ended up walking right along the back of Hameldown hill, much to Frodo's delight.

I always wonder about these old posts, which are dotted all over the top of Hameldown.  I've read that they were erected in the war to stop German gliders landing and were originally much bigger, with barbed wire strung between - but why would you land a glider on top of Hameldown? It's a big old boggy hill in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, they look very good, standing there in the wind and weather.

Looking north west from the summit. In the sunlight over there are Kes Tor and Batworthy, one of my favourite parts of the moor.

Coming down off the northern end of Hameldown, I passed this monument to the crew of an RAF bomber which crashed there during the war.

At Natsworthy, the storms hadn't quite stripped the last of the autumn leaves off the beech trees. Sarah and I were staying at Wooder Manor, a bit further down the valley, when I started writing Mortal Engines, and this is where Tom Natsworthy's name came from.)

And from Natsworthy it was a pretty easy stroll back down the lanes in the evening sunlight.

'Widdershins' - Moorland Mythic Arts in Moretonhampstead

Moretonhampstead is a little town on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. It's not far from where I live, but we seldom have a reason to go there, so yesterday was the first time I'd visited Green Hill Arts, a former primary school which has been turned into artists' studios and a very nice exhibition space.  What drew me there was their new exhibition 'Widdershins', featuring paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythic and mystical themes by some of the artists based in or around the nearby town of Chagford, whose most famous members are Brian Froud and Alan Lee.

How I would have loved this exhibition when I was fourteen!  Back then, Froud and Lee were my heroes, but I never got a chance to see any of their original artwork - I just had to pore over their illustrations in books like Faeries, which they illustrated together in 1979.

Nowadays I would usually run a mile to avoid the sort of people who insist on spelling 'fairy' with an 'e', and Froud seems to have abandoned forever the quirky and beautifully observed landscape backgrounds and strange, foreshortened spaces which were what I always liked best about his work. But it's still good to see some of his pictures up close, including this 'Green Man', (above) which is also used as the exhibition poster.

Wendy Froud, his wife, makes what are basically dolls: troll dolls, faery dolls (definitely faeries with an 'e').  She makes them wonderfully well, but unfortunately I feel about dolls the same way that many people feel about clowns - Eugh, they're so creepy, with their little beady eyes and their winsome, waxy faces! RUN AWAY! Still, she has one piece in this show that I did like very much - a 'wood troll' with gnarled stick-like hands and a bunch of actual sticks sprouting from its back. It could have stepped out of one of her husband's paintings from the '70s, and it's clearly a relative of the mystics in the film The Dark Crystal, which Brian Froud designed and Wendy Froud worked on.

Alan Lee is in New Zealand at present, busy with the Hobbit films, but he's well represented here, with a couple of pencil drawings and the painting of the sleeping Smaug from the illustrated edition of The Hobbit , as well as one of Fangorn Forest from The Lord of the Rings. There's also a piece of his concept art from the LOTR movies - a loose pencil sketch of Eowyn vs the Nazgul, the battlefield suggested with old-masterish skill and economy by wiry, wandering pencil lines.  And there's one of his pictures from Faeries too, done in his older, tighter style, and a cover illustration for an anthology called Hist Whist which I think I can remember being fascinated by (and trying to copy) before I even knew who he was.

His daughter, Virginia Lee, seems to have inherited some of his talent: there's a rather beautiful little relief plaque here of a scene from The Fellowship of the Ring (below, though a photo doesn't really do it justice). My favourites were two of her pastel drawings; imaginary landscapes in which stone angels' wings and carvings of the Tinners' Hares take the place of the stone circles which crown some Dartmoor hilltops.

And it was particularly nice to see some pictures by David Wyatt (with whom I was lucky enough to work on the Larklight trilogy) hanging here among the Frouds and Lees.  His pictures have similar qualities to theirs, while being entirely his own: beautifully drawn, full of invention and visual humour, and steeped in the landscape and atmosphere of Dartmoor.  I've pinched the image below from his excellent blog.

Widdershins continues at Green Hill Arts until 10th August. In addition to the artists I've mentioned there is also work by Terri Windling, Rima Staines, Hazel Brown (whose little boxes of miniature objects have something of the genuine weirdness of 19th Century fairy art), Neil Wilkinson Cave, and Paul Kidby. And Green Hill are running a tie-in programme of events and workshops, too.  If you are in Devon, or planning to visit during the summer, this is well worth a look.

Details on the Green Hill Arts website or Facebook page.

Seawigs in Lyme Regis, Arthur in Wistman's Wood

Lyme Regis

 

 It was a lovely day here on Wednesday, and Sarah McIntyre and I were off to the seaside. We persuaded my wife Sarah to drive us to Lyme Regis, delightful Dorset seaside resort famed for Mary Anning, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and thingy falling off the Cobb in that Jane Austen book, you know the one.

It's only about an hour's drive from Dartmoor to Lyme, but I'm afraid McIntyre still got very bored in the back of the car...

But we weren't just going to the seaside for a jolly, OH NO. We were visiting the Woodroffe School.  Head teacher Richard Steward had asked us to talk to the to year seven pupils about our work.  This is a bit of a strange time, because our first joint book, Oliver and the Seawigs, isn't published yet, but it's coming soon, and we'll be touring the festivals with it this autumn, so it's nice to have a chance to talk about it in advance, and to show people some of Sarah's fabulous illustrations.  And Sarah showed everyone how to draw sea monkeys, which is a very useful skill.

Afterwards, I talked to a group who have been doing some work on Mortal Engines. It's nice that it's still finding new readers after these years, and they'd produced these posters for an imaginary Mortal Engines movie, and some pamphlets for Magnus Crome's re-election campaign. Would you buy a used Traction City from this man?

We even had our photo taken in front of one of the school's amazing murals (and behind some of its amazing pupils) for the local paper...

...though I prefer this picture.

And as we were leaving we met a human whoopee cushion, which rounded the morning off nicely.

Then we strode down the steep hill into the centre of town, met Sarah (who had been pottering about taking photographs and looking for ichthyosaurs) and had lunch at a nice cafe on the sea front, before walking out along the Cobb, as every visitor to Lyme must, especially the ones who have just bought fancy new hats and want their photos taken.

It was pretty much a perfect day...

Wistman's Wood

By Thursday, normality had been restored: it was raining again.  But we set out anyway for Wistman's Wood, in the company of Joyce Herbeck, her colleague Kim, and their students from Montana State University, who are on a whistlestop tour of Britain's literary sites. They'd been at Tintagel the day before, and met me to talk about Here Lies Arthur, among other things. Joyce makes this trip every other year, and when she got in touch last time round to ask if we could meet up  I suggested a quick detour to Wistman's Wood, which is only a short way from the road along a fairly easy track, and looks like the perfect fairytale/fantasy forest. Last time the weather was rather better, but I hope this year's students enjoyed it despite the fog, drizzle and gnats. More on the McIntyreblog, as always. 

Afterwards Joyce bought us lunch at the Two Bridges Hotel, and kindly gave McIntyre and I a lift part of the way home. I think the students were a bit surprised when we got Vince the coach driver to drop us off near Bennet's Cross, on an absolutely featureless stretch of fog-bound heather. (We know how to make a dramatic exit.) We waved them off on their way to their next stop (Stonehenge), and hiked home through the old mining gullies of Heathercombe.

This writing lark is fun, and you get to meet the nicest people! Except that, now and then, you actually have to sit down and do some writing. That's what I shall be doing for the next few weeks - there are a lot of Goblins clamouring for my attention...

Radio Devon Interview & Dartmoor photos

Here's a link to the live interview I did this morning with Judi Spiers for her popular show BBC Radio Devon. We talked for about twenty minutes, about Goblins, The Exeter Riddles, Oliver and the Seawigs, Animated Exeter and last weekend's Chagword festival - which was a huge success, by the way. Many thanks to all the people who turned up to my event! And many thanks too to Sarah McIntyre for posting this morning's interview on YouTube.




Staying with matters Devonian, my wife, Sarah Reeve, is planning to post a photo each day all this year. They're mostly pictures of the Dartmoor landscape near our house, and they're lovely. You can follow her on Instagram (where she goes by the name of moorland) or on Twitter for updates.

Chagword and PhoniCon

I've been zooming all over the place doing school events recently, so it's nice to announce two upcoming appearances much closer to home, in Chagford and Exeter.

Chagford is a little Dartmoor town about twenty miles from Exeter, and close to some of my favourite bits of the moor.  It has long been infested with artists, writers and illustrators, and this year, for the first time, it will be hosting its own literary festival, Chagword. The line-up includes Richard Dimbleby, Kathy Lette, Chris Mullin, and A.L.Kennedy, and I'll be doing a lunch-time session at 1.45 pm next saturday (15th March), in which I'll be talking about Goblins, Dwarves, Mortal Engines and anything anyone cares to ask.  You can find details of my thing here, and here's a link to the main website.  This is Dartmoor's only literary festival, so it would be great to see it thrive and become a regular event.

I'll also be appearing on Sunday 7th April at PhoniCon, a Science Fiction and Fantasy festival at Exeter's Phoenix Arts Centre which will feature films, writers, artists, 'nerdy collectables' and live music in the evening. I'm not sure yet what time I'll be on - probably in the middle of the day - but it looks as if there will be plenty to see whatever time you turn up. Guests include Bristol-based writer Joanne Hall, former Dr Who companion Anneke Wills, and Nicholas Pegg, who, as if being a leading authority on David Bowie isn't cool enough, is also an actual DALEK.

More information here on the PhoniCon website!

Snow Business

I do like a bit of snow. On the down side, I haven't been more than about two miles from home for the past week, but on the up side, Dartmoor looks beautiful, and I feel quite manly going out to fetch firewood and feed the alpacas every morning.  The forecast is saying the weather will turn warm'n'wet again this coming weekend, so I took this morning off and had a good long stomp over the hills near my house before it all melts. Here are some of the photos I've been boring my Twitter followers with...

Bonehill Rocks

Tracks of William Bell's tractor in the field below our house.

Ice on the grass stems, up on the hill this morning

Sam's school was closed, so we got lots of tobogganing and snowball fights in. And I gave him a quick history lesson about Anglo-Saxon England. How King Alfred Burnt the Cakes was something Every Schoolchild Knew when I was little, but the modern curriculum doesn't seem to touch on it. I know it's apocryphal, but it's pretty much the only thing I knew about King Alfred, so I thought it a shame not to pass it on...

Chinkwell Tor

Splat!