Silent on the Moor

Deanna Raybourn's books are very easy to read. She can write a bit but doesn't really succeed at doing more than providing anything more substantial than a bit of light entertainment. This is the third book in the series. With a name like Silent on the Moor I was hopeful that she could pull off some good evocations of what it is like to live on a moor. I live on the edge of a Lancastrian moor myself, so I know there is a wealth of natural beauty and wildlife available to use to colour the narrative. Unfortunately our Lady Julia's eye only manages to see the people that live on the moor, the only wildlife are the pets and the six sheep that are alluded to though never seen. Other than it being wet, grassy, with the odd crag or bog, the moor has to make do with turning silvery in moonlight for its descriptive wiles. The characters are amusing, though there seems to be less and less wit as this series progresses and Brisbane has entirely become a caricature, a Heathcliff shaped silhouette for Lady Julia to play with. As detectives both characters are terribly inept, their modus operandi seems to mainly involve them pottering about waiting for the answers to come to them. In the gaps between pottering they mainly argue and pretend they aren't madly in love with one another. The only real mystery in this book is how on earth Deanna Raybourn manages to get through the entire writing process without using the word 'décolletage' once. My guess is there is a previous draft copy somewhere with the word scribbled out 137 times with an editorial footnote reminding the author of the chilliness of Yorkshire moors. The weirdest thing of all though is that I keep reading them.

The tower on the hill

In the background of this picture is Darwen Tower on Beacon Hill. It was built in 1898 to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, though at the time of its completion the local townsfolk had just won the right to freely access the surrounding moors in an action dubbed The Battle for the Moors and the Tower came to represent their victory. Some websites state that the Tower is called the Jubilee Tower and also mention that it is sometimes referred to as Darwen Tower. I've lived in its shadow for nearly 43 years and I've hardly ever heard a local call it anything else but Darwen Tower. Harry doesn't care what it's called. He doesn't know either that if the landowners had got their way all those years ago he wouldn't have been able to spend so many hours enjoying himself on the Darwen Moors.

The singing moors

The sky cleared up early Thursday morning so I had a look to see if I could see some of the Perseid meteor shower. We are currently on our annual passage through the debris left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. Before I saw any meteors the first thing I noticed was how bright and big Mars was. Later on this month Mars will be as close to Earth as it has been for nearly 60,000 years. It looked really close now so I don't know what it will look like in 12 days time. Then I saw the first shooting star; a quick line of light turning red. It was hardly there for a fraction of a second. I opened the window to lessen the glare and saw some more meteors, fainter ones this time, some so quick they were gone before my eye could centre on them. Then something spooky started. Carried on the wind I could hear singing, like crowd noise from 50-100 people. Sometimes you can hear crowd noise from Ewood Park, half a mile down the road but not at 03:00 a.m. in the morning. It didn't sound like noise from a loud tv - it sounded just like a large group of people chanting a cheerful song. The next day I told my family and they told me that the local news had run a piece about a large gathering of folk that had formed on the moors to watch the Perseid meteor show. It must have been them singing, the voices carried down on the warm night wind.