Aliens of Brockholes Wood is another story set in Earl’s home town, Preston. It is also a story that ties up some loose ends in Chris’s life. But it starts with Sukie sitting at a window with tears in her eyes. That’s not something that happens a lot. Sukie is a smart girl, and a tough one. She doesn’t cry unless something is really wrong.

There is no Ribbleton Hall any more. The first hall was demolished in the 1840s to make way for a house that lasted only another century itself. It survives only as a set of muddy foundations in Grange Park, a road called Ribbleton Hall Drive and a school called Ribbleton Hall High School. It is surrounded by several square miles of the sort of council houses that give architecture a bad name and the sort of social depravation that goes with it. It’s not a nice place, and that’s putting it mildly. It is very hard, looking at the place, now, to imagine that a few hundred years ago Ribbleton was a country manor. The history of the Hall is almost as completely obliterated as the land. I managed to find out that a family called Shuttleworth lived there for at least part of the Elizabethan/Stuart era. I decided to invent a family by that name, Robert and Anne. Their coat of arms with a knight’s helmet and a shuttle from a loom is a nice little touch. Shuttleworth is, of course, an old Lancashire name. There are Shuttleworths in the rolls of honour in town halls like Preston, Blackburn, Clitheroe.

I complicated matters by making them secret papists.

And that was where Chris’s past came home to roost.

Remember the Unfinished Business Story set in the Forest of Pendle, when the eight year old Chris helped hide a seminarian from the Watch? That was ten years ago in seventeenth century time and fourteen years for Chris, who is now twenty-two years old and a strapping, handsome young man. Ribbleton Hall lies roughly twenty miles west of Pendle where the seminarian was at large back then. It is hardly any great surprise if the secretly papist Shuttleworths know him.

Naturally, Chris keeps his secret. Why would he do anything else. Bringing the priest into his confidence is a big move, though. Explaining to a seventeenth century man of God that one day the Pope himself would fly and not consider it unholy or unnatural is a complicated matter. It all comes down to trust. The Seminarian put his life and his trust in Chris when he was only a boy. He continued to do so now, even though the man proved to be something more than he expected.

The aliens are slightly beside the point in this story. It is mostly about Chris and the Seminarian. The fate of the man he met as a boy plagued him, and when he had the chance to change that fate, he took it. Chris and his brother both take the laws of time seriously. But they have both broken them more than once. The Doctor would say they were chips off the old block.

Carya’s dark skin is a bit of an issue in 17th century Lancashire. There wouldn’t be many people like her, and the idea of her married to a man of substance as Chris presents himself, would be puzzling. I had trouble thinking of a place she could come from that wouldn’t make things worse. Southern Spain, where skin colours can be dusky would be suspect since it’s a Catholic country. Northern Africa would be suspect because it’s Muslim. The less said the better about her origins, really. But since she was with him in this story it had to be referred to.

Brockholes Wood is mostly preserved woodland, although a large swathe was cut down for quarrying work in the last half century. This is now a man made wetlands with lakes and bird habitats. Very nice, but a lot different than it would have looked in the 17th century.

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=53192
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbleton

http://www.newlandsproject.co.uk/brockholes.php