'Anxiety is never a good counsellor'.
In this story from Peter Bell's Hauntings a retired teacher returns to her deceased aunt's house in rural Aberdeenshire to find things changed. Fiona's girlhood memories are a mixture of the idyllic and the disturbing. Devoting her time to studying earth mysteries and related matters, Fiona sets out to investigate the area with an adult, informed eye. Instead, she gets lost in one of the vast conifer plantations that were created after the notorious Clearances, and stumbles upon some ruins that arouse feelings of unease.
This is a relatively gentle tale, but one that lingers in the mind. The curlew's cry, held to be ominous by some, is a kind of leitmotif running through the story. The truth that emerges after the visit of a respected professor is a sadly familiar tale of working-class folk victimised by callous landowners. Not exactly a ghost story, then, more an account of a haunted landscape. The beauty of the rural skies stands in contrast to the bleakness of glens set aside for rich men to shoot game. But then, the story is loaded with powerful imagery, not least the scene in which Fiona gets lost in the woods and suffers near panic.
More from this running review tomorrow. So far I am enjoying Hauntings, as you may have guessed!
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