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Talking Location With author Alison Layland – The Magnificent Severn

11th January 2020

#TalkingLocationWith… author Alison Layland.

We asked Alison Layland, author of Riverflow set in rural Shropshire, for her impressions of the locale she describes so wonderfully in her book… Over to Alison:

Alison Layland

Melverley

Borderlands are a unique place to live, and my home on the border between Wales and England is no exception. With the mountains to the west and the rolling Shropshire plain to the east, Welsh language and culture to one side, English to the other, it is a place of contrasts. We have beautiful villages, bustling towns and an inspiring landscape, peopled by close-knit communities. I have written stories set in Wales, but for the setting of my latest novel, Riverflow, although I was pulled in both directions, I soon settled on rural Shropshire, and the river Severn in particular.

At around the time I was beginning to write the novel, we moved house from a remote village in the Welsh mountains. There, during periods of wet weather, we had our own natural rain gauge: folds in the far slope of our steep-sided valley would change to white ribbons as streams began to flow; different ones appeared depending on how strong or prolonged the rain was. In the worst cases, we would feel almost guilty as we imagined these little streams gathering and feeding the river that itself became a tributary of the Severn, causing serious flooding in communities and towns downstream.

Royal Hill before the flood

From the story of Noah to drowned civilisations such as Atlantis or Cantre’r Gwaelod in Welsh legend, floods have had a unique hold on our collective imagination. The catalyst for the location of Riverflow came when visiting a favourite pub and campsite that stands alone on the banks of the Severn, not far from Oswestry in Shropshire. The Royal Hill is situated on a broad, low-lying floodplain that is subject to frequent flooding. At its worst, the pub can be cut off, and on the wall is a montage of photos, including an intriguing large-wheeled vehicle used to transport people to the pub when floodwater makes the roads impassable. There are also several atmospheric photos on the walls of the flooded landscape.

Royal Hill after the flood – December 2018

The seeds of Riverflow were sown as I looked at their photo-montage one evening. The elemental power of the river and its floods would come to play a central part in my story – at both a personal level, as there is a drowning central to the story, and as a representation of the extreme weather events resulting from the anthropogenic climate change that preoccupies my central characters. It also runs through the novel as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of their lives.

Although I had a very specific location in mind as I was writing, and feel as though I’m visiting Alderleat – my characters’ smallholding – every time I go to this particular stretch of the Severn, the novel’s setting and the village of Foxover are totally fictional. Foxover’s Horseshoes inn is not the Royal Hill, or indeed my own village local, but does give an authentic portrayal of the role of the country pub as the hub of a community.

I’m drawn to fictional settings with their feet firmly planted in reality, as I want to evoke a strong sense of place while retaining the freedom to adapt features to suit my story. There’s something satisfying about creating a landscape with its fields, woods and village; one where my characters, Bede and Elin Sherwell, can harness a disused leat to power a renovated water mill, install a turbine to generate energy from the wind, and plant a short-rotation coppice willow plantation on a field at floodplain level, both as a crop with multiple uses and as a natural and effective way of anchoring the soil and helping to prevent flooding. On a darker note, keeping it fictional enabled me to introduce the threat of fracking in the locality, a threat that until recently existed in real life in the wider area, several miles to the north of the novel’s location.

Off the grid

While working on a novel, I occasionally like to take myself off for a few days’ retreat, if possible in a location that gives me some kind of insight into the subject-matter of my writing. In the early days of Riverflow, I stayed in a small cottage on a permaculture farm near Machynlleth in central Wales. My host was delighted to tell me about what they were doing there, much of which fed into my portrayal of Alderleat, from the organic produce in the spacious greenhouse to woodland and landscape protection, management and rewilding. My second local stay was in an attractive gypsy caravan on a totally offgrid glamping site. Working in an open-sided kitchen area on a laptop powered by a solar panel, I not only found space to write, but gained a hands-on insight into my characters’ way of life.

The Welsh border close to my home is formed by a river, the Ceiriog, and I often preface my working day with a walk along its banks. From week to week, month to month, I watch it swell and recede, and the trees, plants and wildlife change with the seasons. This is a perfect reflection of how, a little further afield, the Severn forms the Wales-England border for a short stretch close to the location of Riverflow, and of how the river pervades the novel. Both the river and the offgrid site where I wrote several chapters also formed perfect locations for my daughter’s book trailer video for the novel.

A big thank you to Alison for a very insightful piece. And you can catch Alison on Twitter

Tony for the TripFiction team

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Comments

  1. User: judith barrow

    Posted on: 20/02/2020 at 11:54 am

    Loved this book by Alison Leyland. The setting comes alive as a background to the characters’ struggles. Wonderful.

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