Talking Location With author Anna Mazzola – Isle of Skye

25th July 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… author Anna Mazzola, who takes her readers to the beautiful Isle of Skye in her new novel The Story Keeper

The idea for The Story Keeper came from a real case from the 1880s: the West Ham Vanishings. A number of young girls disappeared from the slums of East London. One of them, Eliza Carter, returned briefly before her final disappearance and told her friends that the fairies had kidnapped her and forbidden her to return home.

However, rather than base the novel on the real case, as I had done with my first novel, The Unseeing, I decided to transport it to a different place. To turn it into my own dark fairy tale.

I needed a country in which many people still believed in fairies and folklore in the 1800s, a place with a rich oral history and a place steeped in magic. When I visited Skye, with its beautiful and eerie landscape, and its history of cleared people and stolen stories, I knew I’d found the right place.

Breakish

Bleak and beautiful

Skye is the second largest of Scotland’s islands, a 50-mile-long stretch of knife-edged mountains, glinting lochs, velvet moors, and perilous sea cliffs. It’s sublime, but it’s also strange: largely treeless, and marked by the stolen homes of the crofting communities who were evicted during the Highland Clearances and sent on boats to Canada, America, Australia.

I read much about the history of Skye, of the Clearances, of the Gaelic language and of the folklore – the fireside stories that Audrey, the protagonist in the Story Keeper, is tasked with collecting. I spent time at the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre where the wonderful staff helped me locate census records, 19^thcentury maps, and photographs of police officers, clergymen and crofters. More useful than any of that, however, was the land itself. The atmosphere.

As a writer who also has a job and two small children, I couldn’t bed down in a bothy for weeks at a time. I did, however, have several research weekends on Skye, walking the locations that feature in the book.

Underground cairns and a beautiful bay – Broadford

The main town in Skye is Portree, a fascinating place, rich in history, and one that features later in the novel. For the main setting, however, I wanted somewhere closer to where the crofting communities lived, and somewhere less well known. Broadford was the second biggest village in Skye in the 19^thcentury, the place where the cattle market took place, and where a limekiln operated. Beann na Caillich (the hill of the old woman) looks down upon a beautiful bay. It was on the edge of that bay – at Irishman’s Point – that I situated Lanerly, the mansion where the reclusive folklorist, Miss Buchanan, lives. And it’s in the bay beneath the house that Audrey finds the body of a young girl, and where she sees a cloud of strange black birds.

I stayed in a little cabin just by the bay, watching for eagles and otters, puffins and seals. I felt the wind rock the cabin as the storms came in. I wrote more in one weekend than I had in weeks.

Broadford Bay

I also went out walking, and running: to the underground cairn, where a wrist-guard of green stone had been found. To Skulamus and Breakish, stunning landscapes where crofting communities once lived, and where now the Red Skye Restaurant serves up delicious dinners.  I spent a wonderful afternoon at Café Sia writing in the Autumn sun, gazing up at Beinn na Caillich while sipping excellent coffee.

The cleared coast – Suisnish and Boreraig

One day I set out to walk all the way to the ghost village of Suisnish, a journey that Audrey herself makes to find the dead girl’s uncle. The walk took me past the ruined 16^thcentury church of Cill Chriosd on the road to Elgol, and along the Marble Line, the route of a railway that once ran between Broadford and a series of marble quarries. Then across moorland, towards the sea. For a Londoner who’s used to constant noise: cars, sirens, humans – it’s quite something to walk for miles in a place where there’s only the wind over the red grass, the chirruping of tiny birds, the sheep chewing grass, the murmur of the sea.

Church on the road to Elgol

Eventually, I reached the stone houses at Suisnish, that stand as memorial to the people who were brutally cleared: old women and children evicted and homes burned to make way for the more profitable sheep.

Suisnish

If you want to experience something what it would have been like to live in a peat-stained crofting cottage, I recommend the Skye Museum of Island Life up in Kilmuir: a series of thatched cottages, showing how people would have lived and worked at the end of the 19^thcentury.

Writing at Cafe Sia

The skeleton of a strange beast – the Quiraing

The other key location in The Story Keeper is the Quiraing: a spectacular and strange landscape formed by a landslip, which created high cliffs, hidden plateaus and sharp needles of rock. Here, Audrey is told, her mother slipped and fell, many years before.

I didn’t fall when I walked it myself, but I have to confess that I did get lost. I ended up on the wrong side of the ridge with not a person in sight, only rocks and rabbits and the occasional straying sheep. I recommend you take a map.

Thank you so much to Anna for bringing to life this beautiful part of the world. Do follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and via her website

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