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Talking Location With author Matthew Harffy – NORTHUMBERLAND

6th February 2021

Matthew Harffy#TalkingLocationWith… with Matthew Harffy, author of A Time For Swords – Northumberland

It has become a bit of a running joke with my wife that I always visit the locations of my novels after they have been published! We often seem to book holidays to parts of Britain just a few weeks after books in which they feature have appeared on bookshelves. At these times, it is with some trepidation that I walk the land I have researched and written about, terrified that I will see something totally at odds with my descriptions of the place. Luckily, so far, I haven’t made any glaring mistakes, as far as I know.

Where possible, it is always great to get to walk in the footsteps of characters you are writing about, but it is not always practical to do so. There are constraints of time and economy, and in the case of writers covering areas of the world that are in political turmoil, it might not be feasible or safe to travel there. In 2020, of course, travelling became a luxury many of us were unable to indulge in, so I counted myself lucky to be writing in the twenty-first century, where we have easy access to a plethora of tools that enable us to see what distant places are like. My internet search history would show an enormous number of hits on Google Maps, Google Earth and YouTube, where you can often find videos of people walking the streets of cities and villages that otherwise would be beyond my reach.

Much of my writing, set in the early medieval period, has been centred around Northumberland in the North East of England, and A Time for Swords is no exception. In particular, A Time for Swords takes place on the island of Lindisfarne, and a small village called Warkworth, on the river Coquet.

Matthew Harffy

© Littlerich

© Matthew Harffy

Unable to visit in person, it is lucky for me, that as well as the online resources I have accessed to virtually travel about the Northumberland countryside, I have a couple of other weapons in my arsenal: memory and imagination. Both are available to all writers, of course, but not every writer has lived in the area they are writing about. As a child, I lived in a small village called Norham on the banks of the River Tweed (on the border of Scotland), and my recollections of the place and the surrounding landscape, certainly informs my writing and descriptions of Northumberland.

I am also lucky enough to now live in a beautiful area in the South West of England, where I am able to walk the countryside with my dog, Blue. Even though I live in what was once the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a long way from the kingdom of Northumbria, there is something I can glean from each walk. The landscape may be different, but a driving rain sweeping across the farmland of Wessex feels much the same as rain falling from stormy skies over the Cheviot Hills. Because I write about a time long ago, when much of my characters’ took place outdoors, each experience I have on my daily walks with Blue helps me to add colour to the natural world inhabited by the monks, warriors, peasants and priests of my books.

A chance sighting of a heron on the canal, becomes a mention of the same bird on the wide waters of the river Tweed or Coquet.

Matthew Harffy

© Matthew Harffy

The sound of winds sighing through the branches of an oak at the edge of a ploughed field, can easily be translated to the woodland growing beside the banks of the river that almost surrounds Warkworth.

Climbing to the top of the Roundway Down, the grass slick beneath my feet, becomes the slippery slope of the hill leading up to the hall where Hunlaf and the other defenders of Warkworth gather in the face of the Viking marauders who threaten the settlement.

© gardener4u

Being forced into lockdown due to the pandemic has been difficult for everyone, and I am definitely one of the lucky ones who has suffered nothing more than a curb to my ability to travel and visit public places. Until we are able to travel freely once more, I will rely on the Internet, books, my memories, and imagination. But I cannot wait until we are able to once again journey further from home. Perhaps when the lockdown is lifted, I can visit Warkworth for the first time and see if I got it right in A Time for Swords

Author bio:

Matthew Harffy lived in Northumberland as a child and the area had a great impact on him. The rugged terrain, ruined castles and rocky coastline made it easy to imagine the past. Decades later, a documentary about Northumbria’s Golden Age sowed the kernel of an idea for a series of historical fiction novels. The first of them is the action-packed tale of vengeance and coming of age, The Serpent Sword.

Matthew has worked in the IT industry, where he spent all day writing and editing, just not the words that most interested him. Prior to that he worked in Spain as an English teacher and translator. Matthew lives in Wiltshire, England, with his wife and their two daughters.

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