#5: Cecily's ghost
Footpaths • Monday 23 June 2025
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Over the solstice weekend, we drove down into County Durham to a campsite beside an old limestone quarry. It was our first foray into camping as a family of four. We lit a fire for the shortest night, the kids bouncing off canvas walls, too excited to sleep.
In daylight, we visited Raby Castle near Staindrop, the seat of the Nevilles, where Cecily Neville was born, mother of Edward IV and Richard III. Her image is in the chapel. Across the dry moat, a deer ghosted into the wood.
Saturday night, a storm rolled over. ‘This is so exciting!’ says Zack to Mimi as the rain drums down. Later, by lamplight, I read H is for Hawk:
…and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. The hawk’s wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porpentine. Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel.
A great wind chases us back to Newcastle. A day later, it still stalks the streets outside. Doors slam, windows rattle. Something skates off a sill in a room upstairs. Thud. Nothing broken.
I have two documents open. One is the overstory; the bird’s-eye view. Here I plot and I plan and work out where I’m going. The other is understory; word mulch. A compost of ideas and phrases and half-seen scenes. I watch both grow.
Books on my bedside table
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann), Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee, A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Terri Ochiagha. John Mullan’s How Novels Work and How Fiction Works by James Wood.
Word mulch - so good