Lisa M. Lilly shares how Prague captured her imagination, weaving the city’s gothic romance and ancient legends into her latest detective novel. From the astronomical clock that’s been marking time since 1410 to the legendary golem still said to rest in a synagogue, discover how this enchanting city became both a setting for fiction and a place of personal reflection.

Lisa M. Lilly writes detective novels and supernatural thrillers, and also the author of Writing as a Second Career: Books for Writers. Her latest book, The Skeptical Man, features Prague in the Czech Republic

• How Prague’s architecture and eerie beauty immediately captivated a Chicago-based writer
• The city’s rich alchemical history and the famous golem legend, from medieval mysticism to modern AI parallels
• Navigating grief while traveling after losing a close friend
• Rooftop dining experiences and local Czech specialties, from monastery beer gardens to traditional duck restaurants
• Books about Prague including Wolf on a String, Prague the Mystical City, and more

You can find Lisa at LisaLilly.com 

You can also take a day trip from Prague to Kutna Hora where you can find Sedlec Ossuary, or The Bone Church, which inspired my thriller, Crypt of Bone.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Lisa M. Lilly. Hi Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. It’s so good to see you, and thank you for having me on the podcast. I’m really excited.

Jo: Oh yeah, it’s going to be fun today. Just a little introduction. Lisa writes detective novels and supernatural thrillers, and also the author of Writing as a Second Career: Books for Writers. Her latest book, The Skeptical Man, features Prague in the Czech Republic, which we are talking about today.

So Lisa, you are in America.

Why were you drawn to visit Prague and research the city for this book?

Lisa: It happened the other way around in a way. Two years ago, I went to Prague by way of Krakow because that was the main city we were going to. My travel companion and I went because my grandparents were originally from that area, came to the United States in the early 1920s or so. And I had never been. And so my friend Steve said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to see Prague, but let’s wrap that in too.” And I more or less just said, “Okay, yeah, that sounds good.”

And from the second I saw the city, we took a train there from Paris, because we also went to Paris. I just saw the architecture and we came into Old Town. And I thought, “Oh, I’m going to want to come back here. This is a beautiful city.”

And as we walked around, I was very intrigued by the history of alchemy in Prague and we did not get to the Alchemist Museum. That was on my list to go to next time. But I started thinking about it. All these story ideas – I’m very motivated by place and I had not even been sure I was going to write another book in the series right then. I was thinking of taking a break and all these story ideas started coming to mind and the more places we saw, the more I’d think, “Oh, this would be a great scene. This would be a great place to set something.”

I think Prague is so beautiful and kind of eerie in some places that it just evokes so many ideas.

Jo: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. Well, first of all, you said Krakow and you got the train from Paris. I mean, obviously Krakow’s closer. You could have got the train.

Lisa: Well, we went Paris to Prague, Prague to Krakow.

Jo: Oh, okay. Yeah, because it’s really – for people who might not know, you know, the Czech Republic is really right in the center of Europe, well connected with Germany, Austria, Poland, Slovakia. So, and the trains. And this always surprises me in America, because I’ve been over to the US a lot and the trains are terrible. Whereas in Europe, you could just get everywhere by train, right? So I love that you arrived by train as an American.

Lisa: Well, it turned out for us, it wasn’t the best way to go because we had worked with this travel agent who specialized in trains because we thought, “Oh, trains would be great. We’d always heard this about Europe.” And it was in terms of connectivity, but she didn’t think to tell us we were doing this almost four-week trip, so we had tons of bags. We each had two big rolling bags, two smaller bags. And we were picturing – I know you’ve taken the Amtrak where you get the compartments and you could stow your bags above and check your bags.

So we’re lugging all these bags and there’s nowhere to put them because —

Jo: We all have backpacks!

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And people are just looking at us like, “What? What are you doing?” And there’s not a porter and we didn’t… so I would say to people, yeah, be prepared. I enjoyed the trip, and I talked to some people from Prague to Krakow. One of my favorite parts of the trip was talking to people in the compartment who were telling me – who were Polish and were telling me about all these traditions, and I’m asking them questions. It was wonderful. But yeah, don’t take eight bags. And don’t… yeah, do it if you’ve got like one bag and a backpack and know your stops.

We got off on the wrong stop. We didn’t know there were two Dresden stops. So we’re out and we’re like, “Why can we not find this connection? We need to get to Prague.” But people were so helpful. I can’t tell you how many people offered to help me with a bag or like block the train door when they were going to close it on us because very serious in Germany about the train times or help me find… I just went up to someone and said, “I don’t know how to get the train to Prague” and they just happened to speak English and were taking that train and said, “Okay, follow, follow us.” Very patient. Very nice people. Just wonderful.

Jo: Oh yeah. Well it sounds like you had an adventure in getting there.

Lisa: It was. We flew the next time.

Jo: Yeah. Okay, so let’s come back. So you said the moment you kind of saw the city and the architecture was all amazing.

What were some of the highlights, like your favorite parts of the city?

Lisa: Yeah. I loved, you know, this is very touristy, but I love the Charles Bridge because there’s just so much going on there. We walked through during the day and at night there are singers, we saw dancers. We saw a couple dressed up as a bride and groom doing a whole song and dance thing together, vendors. And of course I thought, “What a great place for a chase scene, a foot chase scene,” which ended up in my book. So I loved that.

I loved the Old Town Square, the whole Old Town neighborhood. I really enjoyed… We went to see the – I’m sure you’ve seen it – the astronomical clock, which plays I think every half hour. And you can see all these figures coming out. And I think it’s the…

Jo: I just wrote this down. It’s the from 1410, the world’s oldest working astronomical clock.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s… and you see people just standing there watching, which is how we found it. We had trouble finding it because we came to the square in a direction where the way the buildings were and the churches, you couldn’t actually see it and finally saw all these people in this narrow area that’s along the side.

That’s something else I love too, though, just the streets and how you could wander and you’d end up behind the buildings and come out another place. In Chicago where I live, we’re on a grid, so almost everything is square blocks, which is great for navigating but not as intriguing for walking around. So I love the cobblestone streets. I love the Prague Castle. I went there a number of times and we don’t have castles here either, so it’s very… that’s like a proper castle.

Jo: Oh yeah. We should say, if you stand on St. Charles Bridge and look out, it sort of dominates the skyline there, doesn’t it?

Lisa: It is what you think of as a castle and beautiful to see at night. And that reminds me just the river itself, the Vltava River. I found so peaceful. I spent a lot of time sitting by the river and reading and just watching it sparkle. And in any weather, just, I think it might be the prettiest river I’ve seen. The water seems so clear and it’s very tranquil. It’s also very shallow. I found out, so perhaps that’s why it looks so pretty. I don’t know. But the boat tours can’t go very far because they run into the bottom of the river. They just can’t keep going.

Jo: You went this year as well, did you?

Lisa: Yes. I went two years ago and went back this year and did a number of boat trips on it.

Jo: I was there in 2015, so a decade ago. I don’t remember the river being low, but then I was there in the winter. And also this summer has been one of the driest.

Lisa: Yes, I didn’t think about that. They were telling us as the river was low, and they did show us the different times that had flooded. We took one with a small boat where they could go into, I don’t know the right word, but the sort of offshoots of the river and would show us where the flooding had been and where the river level was at different points and that. Yeah, I didn’t think about that. It was very low when we went.

Jo: And you’ve been both in the summer, both times?

Lisa: Both in the summer in mid-May through mid-June. Just beautiful weather both times. We did a lot of rooftop dining, which you could see the whole city, and you could see the Prague Castle. And it’s particularly beautiful at night when the sun sets and it outlines the castle.

Jo: Yeah, it’s very kind of gothic romance. But I was there in the winter, so we went for New Year and you don’t sit by the river reading in the winter. It is freezing. It’s proper furry hoods and boots kind of weather. But also you can eat outside, but there’s lots of heaters and things, so it’s very well set up for winter. Like a lot of people go at winter for the Christmas markets and that kind of thing.

Lisa: Oh, I bet the Christmas market is… is it very big? Is it really something to see?

Jo: Yeah, it’s something. Well that, yeah, it’s the square and all the little places, but again, quite touristy. But Prague’s also well known for its beer and general nightlife.

Lisa: Oh yes. It’s funny, the other amazing thing was the monastery. I loved, you go upstairs and you see the cabinets of curiosity where the emperor had collected all these things that seemed very amazing and exotic from foreign lands. And then you see the notes and it’s like a fossil of some kind of fish that we know today. This is not a big deal, but people… they couldn’t travel the way you could now, and I love that.

And they all these books that you can’t go into the area. But I loved seeing all the books and they kept saying to us, “Oh, you have to go. The monks make this wonderful beer, and you have to go to the beer garden.” I can’t tell you how many people told us that, and neither Steve nor I like beer. So we kept being like, “Well that sounds, that sounds wonderful.” And yeah, so many signs for beer. So apparently, if you like it, good place to try a lot of beer.

Jo: It is. It’s definitely a beer capital of the world. So I mean, I guess one of the areas of the city is the Jewish quarter. I don’t know if you had a look around there.

What about the Jewish Quarter?

Lisa: We did get… the time that we went, there had been some incidents, they were limiting a lot of access, so we were only able to drive in and look at the main synagogue from the outside and we could see the gates to the cemetery. I would have really liked to go in. And our guide mostly was telling us about how much it has changed.

But she told us some of the history. You probably know the story of the golem of Prague. She told us that story.

There’s a number of versions. So the one that she told us was at the time the Emperor Rudolf II. This was like, I want to say 1500s. I hope I’ve got that right. He was very into alchemy and magic, and at the same time there was so much anti-Jewish sentiment trying to either drive the Jews out of Prague, or sometimes kill Jewish people, and yet he and the rabbi had something of a relationship.

But the rabbi created the golem which was made of clay and brought it to life to help protect the people in the neighborhood. And the version, the story she told us was it could only act based on instruction. So by itself it just would stand there. And he gave it instructions, but it came the Sabbath and he forgot to tell it to stop.

And it went on a rampage killing rampage, and he finally had to stop it at the end of the day and like not kill it, but deactivated it, I guess we’d say. And they say it’s still in the synagogue. That it’s still there.

And the funny thing, I had heard the story from a friend who was writing a book that included it, that talked about it as the first robot. The idea of it only acts on instructions, and now our guide said it’s sort of like AI. It only does what you tell it to, but you have to be careful how you instruct it and what you tell it to do.

Jo: That’s so interesting. I actually like that because the story goes that it’s sort of partly to do with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. And you put, he put letters, the rabbi put letters onto the golem. And that’s the thing that brought it to life and so it’s words that actually brought it to life, that this text is on it, this holy text.

And so I kind of like that with the AI stuff because it’s words that are activating it. But, well, I went a decade ago and went into the cemetery, and I think it’s really interesting because it’s an area that’s obviously been affected by war, and Hitler didn’t destroy that area to keep it as “a museum for an extinct race.” That’s why it was preserved. And I mean, that in itself is just awful in many ways.

And yet that cemetery there because it, as you say, it was a ghetto and the people were hemmed in, they, that goes sort of 10 deep and there’s so many gravestones in there and people put stones on in remembrance.

And so if people listening, if at some point we’re at another point in history where you can visit that cemetery, it’s an incredibly moving place. And quite different because it’s very, I guess dark. And then the Spanish synagogue, which you said you were on the outside, but the inside of the Spanish synagogue also sometimes called the Golden Synagogue because it’s just incredibly decorated and beautiful.

So yeah, I mean that Jewish quarter is fantastic. But yeah, the time in history that we are recording this, it’s a difficult time again. Which in itself is so…

Lisa: Heartbreaking and devastating that so long later and the same things are still happening. She was telling us she would get invited to events there and had to have someone come out and vouch for her and show her ID and let her in because there’s so concerned, understandably, about terrorists coming into the synagogue.

We did get to go to two other cemeteries, I’m going to say it wrong, but Vinohrady and Vyšehrad cemeteries and that was, well, I know you’ll understand this. One of the highlights of the trip for me in the sense of the beauty and seeing these gravestones, we don’t do too many of the above the ground gravestones in the US anymore. It’s all flat. But seeing like family names and this history of the family, and I was struck by so many people put their professions on the headstone, which is another thing that we don’t do here.

Or at least I haven’t seen it much. And it really got me thinking about… I mean feeling connected in a way to, we see these stories of people so long after they’re gone. And the names, I grew up in a neighborhood, lots of immigrants, lots of Polish immigrants, lots of Bohemian immigrants, and so many of the names were, I’m like, “Oh, that’s the name, last name of this friend of mine in grade school.”

And many of them were names I knew. Now were they related to the people I knew, maybe, probably not, maybe distantly, but it gave me that sense of great connection with history and with here we are across an ocean. And that sense of being part of the human family and especially in a time when everyone feels so divided it felt very peaceful and very connected and not as sad as I thought you would think, “Oh, this is sad. You’re looking at all these people who are gone.” But somehow it felt like having a place in that history.

Jo: Yeah. That’s interesting. And yeah, I obviously, I find graveyards wonderful places to think about how short life is, and so we better make the most of it — memento mori. 

But you did mention in our emails that a friend of yours died while you were traveling and so you were also facing grief on your visit and thinking about her.

How do you think travel almost helps with grief?

Lisa: For me, it was in a way the perspective of feeling that larger connected sense and that life. The finiteness of life having, of course, we all know that. But I was getting this news about my friend who we had expected she had had a surgery that there was an expected recovery. And I’d seen her a number of times before I left and was sending her photos. She loved travel photos. She always was like, “Send me more, send me more.”

And then they found other problems and she was gone very quickly just in a couple weeks. And some of that news I was getting while we were in the cemetery that the type of news where you look and say, “This is not good. Like this is probably, I’m not going to see her again.” And it was really sad because I could not then be there at the time and couldn’t be there for the wake and be there with the family.

And at the same time, I would think, “Well, I know Julie. She loved travel. She loved hearing about travel, like she wouldn’t want me to spend this time, all of it, just feeling sad.” Of course, I felt sad and was grieving, but it was a reminder that and this is the only time I have, and this is the time to enjoy this or experience it, like don’t miss the experience I’m in because I’m also grieving and feeling sad that trying to maintain both at the same time.

One of your podcasts helped me because I was feeling very sad and then I was feeling not guilty, but almost like, “Well, but I’m here. Like I’m missing it. And I shouldn’t be dwelling on this, but how can I not?” And I listened. I think it was your first one when you restarted the podcast and your guest said something about the difference between vacation and travel and that travel is not always fun.

And it is not always, you don’t always have a great time, like you look forward and think, “Oh, everything’s going to be fantastic.” And it’s not, it’s sometimes challenging, and I think she was talking about other things, but she said, “There is that value.

“You still have the value. Even if it is challenging, you are experiencing something and when you come back, you’ll have experienced this journey.”

And it doesn’t all have to be so much fun and wonderful that it is still a valuable trip and not just. Helped me. It put it in perspective that I am still having this experience and I want to be present in it, even though I’m also having these feelings and this sadness and loss.

Jo: No, I love that. I think that’s really great and something for us all to keep remembering as well. And perhaps even a city like Prague and many in Krakow is another great example, of cities that have suffered in many ways. Obviously we have war in Europe at the moment and so it’s not everything is wonderful all the time anyway.

Lisa: Right, exactly. I kept telling myself that, I’m like, “Well, if I was home, I would likewise, I would be feeling sad and, yeah, life is not wonderful all the time.” Yeah, there are many wonderful things in it. And that that also, my friend who passed, she was really great at focusing on the wonderful things in life.

We had a tradition every year of going to this steak dinner after volunteering at our law school. And for weeks before, she’d say, “Oh my God, I can’t wait to that dinner. Like, they have such great food. Let’s get this as an appetizer, and oh, so-and-so will be there and tell us stories.” And then a month after, she’d say, “Wasn’t that a great time? Like, didn’t we have, remember this thing.” And so I thought about that a lot too. Like she had lots of ups and downs, but she chose to think and remember and anticipate, and I thought “That’s what I need to do. Like think about, oh, these were the great parts of the trip. This is what I really enjoyed.”

Jo: I think that’s really interesting and almost you are honoring her by enjoying the time that you had there and yet, I wonder how many, as I was talking to someone recently who was like, “Oh, I really just want to go to this particular place.” And I’m like —

“Well, why don’t you make a plan to do it because we’re not getting any younger, and you don’t know when something might happen like it did to your friend, or you don’t know when just things change.”

And so I’m like, “Well, you just make a plan, and you save up the money. You book a ticket. We’re very lucky to live in a world where you are going to be able to get to most of the places that people want to get to.”

So do you think sometimes we find it easier to honor other people than honoring ourselves? Like giving ourselves that kind of grace?

Lisa: Yeah. I do, I feel like it’s almost giving, it’s like this person outside of you giving you that permission or that reminder. And especially for me, I’m someone who tends toward anxiety, which is all about thinking about what could go wrong.

And I often deal with it by thinking of friends who think very differently than I do. And I think so now I will think, “Well, how would Julie approach this?” Or I have other friends who will think, “How would this person think about this?” And it helps because. You know, and why can’t I just tell myself to do it? I don’t know.

But it works better when I think of that other person. And maybe it is what you said, it’s like someone else giving you permission and saying, “Hey, it’s okay. Like you can let go of. Oh my God, I’ve got to be sure. I know I’m prepared for everything that might go wrong or everything that might happen,” which is, you know, when travel, I always have a lot of anxiety going up to travel because I’m like, “Did I do this? Did I get that?” And then I’ll say, “You cannot prepare for everything. That’s part of it.”

Jo: Something else, most people are lovely and they will want to help you. Like wherever you are in the world generally, people are just nice and they want to help you.

Lisa: Yeah, I really have found that. I mean, of course here and there, you meet someone who’s not, which is also true at home. But yeah, for most people, for all that, people will say to me, “Well, do they like tourists there?” I’m like, “I don’t, I mean, people seem very nice. They seem glad that we’re there, and if they don’t like us, they’re hiding it really well.”

Jo: I mean, it’s a tourist destination, right? It’s a tourist industry.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s part of what they do. I actually found in Prague particularly, people are, yes, very friendly and seem very, either they’re really, they seem actually really happy at their jobs. So maybe working conditions are better there. And it also might be that they do appreciate this is part of the way, this is especially the Old Town area, it’s a lot of it is tourists and so it’s how people are making their living.

Jo: For sure. Well, just, I guess coming back on the city in terms of the literary side of things, there’s obviously the Franz Kafka Museum is one of the top places. Any thoughts on the literary side?

Lisa: Yeah, you see Kafka everywhere. Everywhere. And I have to confess, we did not go to the museum. Not that I dislike Kafka, but he’s not my first choice for reading. But yeah, there is so much. I read a book before I went this time in between the two trips that a guide that I work with both times recommended and it’s called Wolf on a String. So I wrote down the author and, let me look here. Benjamin Black and it is set in that time at the Emperor Rudolf II. And it is about this kind of amateur alchemist or someone who pretends to be an alchemist, but it has so much history and a lot of it is in the Prague Castle.

So I was very excited to go there and my guide was pointing out, “Oh, this is where the small, they called them houses, but it was basically a room that was bordered on the outside and this is where they stayed. And this is what was called the Golden Row or the Golden Alley. And here’s why.”

And that was really exciting. She took me to, took us to a place called The Alchemist, which borders on a courtyard where a very famous alchemist. Last name was Kelly. Lived in a tower and served the king. So everywhere. If you read anything about Prague odds are you’re going to be able to go there and find that place and still find traces of it.

The place we went had alchemy symbols all over the wall, so you could go and trace that. And I love that so much of history is still there. When a historical novel you would read, you can go and visit. This is, again, probably not as much of a novelty to people who live in Europe. But here there’s so many things are just. It’s old if a building’s a hundred years old, and there I’m seeing these things from the 1300s.

Jo: Yeah. And many of them very well preserved as well. I think, you know, there are a lot of them there. But it’s funny, I mean, like you say, Chicago, I remember the first time I went to Chicago, gosh, in the nineties, and I just, I love the skyscrapers and you can go on architecture tour of modern architecture.

It’s just a very different view, isn’t it? You can see beauty of a different kind. Whereas I feel, you know, here we feel like —

We live in a museum here in Europe.

Lisa: Yes. That’s how it feels when I visit. So I kind of feel better that you say that too. Oh, because always think do, do people look at us and be like, “What? When, why are you so enthralled with this?”

Jo: I find it beautiful, you know, I live in Bath where we’ve got like 2000 year old Roman baths down the road, so.

Lisa: Yeah. And that point about beauty, I think that is what I love traveling, is I, yeah. One of the reasons I love Chicago is I love the architecture. I love the buildings. I love that we have a river, and I’ll take boat tours, architectural boat tours, and just see what else I learn. There’s always more buildings going up, but I go somewhere like Prague and it’s a very different architecture. It’s in some ways. There’s more continuity because much of it is still standing and more is built, but it’s built along the same lines and you have the cobblestone streets and it’s a totally different kind of beauty.

But both places, I look around and think, “Oh, I’m so lucky to be here. I’m so lucky to see this.” Paris, same thing. I feel like so many cities have beautiful architecture. And I have to say in the US, that is not necessarily true. Most cities I go to having grown up where I did, I look around and I’m like, “Wait, what? This is the city. Where are the, where are the amazing buildings?”

Jo: That’s true. That’s true. But just coming back, so earlier you said you weren’t so much into the beer, but —

What food and drink you did enjoy since you said you were eating outside?

Lisa: Yeah. My travel partner and I, we tend to plan trips around where we’re going to eat. We will make these restaurant reservations. So we went to, it’s called Miru. It is only open two months of the year on the rooftop of the Four Seasons Hotel. And last time we were there, we missed it. And this time we were able to go, and it is, they have maybe four or five tables only, and it’s one of these tasting menus. So each course is very small and very beautiful, and they have a drink paired with each, so wine at one point, sake, which I admit I could only have a sip of. And I was like, “Okay, that’s all for that.”

But it’s at night. So you have the beautiful view of the castle and each dish is, you know, it might be salmon, but it’s salmon with a little bit of caviar and some tuna foam and something else. All very elaborate and fancy so that if you just want an experience for a night, it’s wonderful.

This is also touristy, but there is a steak house there that is some of the best steak I ever had. It’s called George Prime, and ironically, the steak is from the Midwest in the United States. But it’s, it was, it’s something about the way they make it. I don’t know. Excellent. And we did two other rooftop restaurants.

One is called Coda on the roof of the Aria Hotel and everything is music themed. The food is very good. Like I had a farm raised chicken that was wonderful. But it’s also just to be up there outside. And if you get a plate, every plate has a different drawing of a different musician on it. And the menu is music themed, so a little bit touristy, but but it is that’s good. Very fun.

And then one, really good local place. Krčma U Fleku, I think, is it? It’s known for its duck. So if you Google duck and Prague and mostly locals there, like we heard mostly Czech being spoken, if you like duck, wonderful duck and wonderful atmosphere. It reminded me, again, as a kid, I went to a number of, if there was a party, it would be in a banquet and often in a Bohemian banquet hall.

And I walked in and I’m like, “Oh, these are the furnishings that I grew up with. This is like being at my aunts and uncle’s houses only stepped up fancy and really, really good food there.” So if you like Bohemian food or Polish food or Czech, that’s a great place to go. I think duck is definitely…

Jo: Duck is the thing for that region.

Lisa: Yeah, really good.

Jo: Yeah, that’s great. That’s fantastic. So this is the Books and Travel show.

You mentioned Wolf on a String. Are there other books that you would recommend that are about or set in Prague or the area?

Jo: Yeah, for research, so between the trips, when I decided to set something in Prague, I got a book called Prague, the Mystical City. It was written in 1970. It goes through 1983. I forget the publication date, but it covers the city 1907 to 1983 and I, it’s at least 10 years old, but it really gives you that feel of Prague. It talks a lot about the history of alchemy and magic and how alchemy worked into science, how much the alchemists were the basis of so many scientific and chemistry advances later.

And it really gives you that feel for Prague if you want to read nonfiction. Interestingly, AI hallucinated for me, other books by the same author, and I was like, “Oh my God, that is a great book.” And I went hunting and hunting and I even asked like a librarian at the local university and she’s like, “Yeah, I think it made this up.”

But that’s how I found this one. I was like, “Okay.” And the other book I just happened to read, I don’t know if you read the All Souls Trilogy. It started with A Discovery of Witches, so the third…

Jo: Deborah Harkness.

Lisa: Right. Deborah Harkness. And this book, they go back, I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler. I’m not going to tell any plot things, but they go back in time and they’re in Prague in the same time period. Somehow I kept running into this same time period with the Emperor Rudolf. And there is a golem in it and it is, she meets a number of these historical figures. So if you are interested in like supernatural books, I would read the first two first, but it was very neat and I just happened to read it maybe six months before coming back to Prague. So I love that one as well.

And of course, Wolf on a String, I will say Wolf on a String. It has a mystery. So I like that. It is a bit bleak, a little bit bleak for me. So I persisted because I wanted to read about the city. And it is an interesting story. But, if you want something more uplifting, maybe, maybe not, maybe not that, maybe not. But if you’re good with a lot of darkness, then go with it.

Jo: And we should say as we record this is not out yet, but The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown is supposedly set opens in Prague. So we shall, I shall be reading that when it comes out.

Lisa: I am so excited about that. You had mentioned that in the email and somehow I didn’t know that until you said it. And yeah, I cannot wait to get that. I love his books anyway. And now to read it in Prague, that will be wonderful.

Jo: And so your book, The Skeptical Man also has some scenes set there. But tell us a bit more about that. Because it’s also across the US as well, isn’t it?

Lisa: Yes, most of it is in the US. I had never, this is the seventh book in my mystery series. I had never taken the characters outside of the United States and I was going to take a bit of a break because the sixth book was kind of a big thing that a mystery was solved that had been running. And taking this trip in the back of my mind, I always had this idea about a magician as the victim, as the murder victim.

A magician who also debunks psychics a little bit like there was a real magician who did that. The Amazing Randi and I used a little bit of his life as a model. So when I went to Prague, I thought, “Oh, how interesting it would be if some of the people that are suspects are somehow connected to like a psychic.”

I didn’t decide was it going to be a genuine psychic or someone who was a little bit of a little bit of a little scammy. And something about being in Prague, I started thinking, “Oh, what what if there was a whole network that was based here and that played into this magician’s death.” He had crossed paths with these people and it. It really inspired me. So in the story, the detective QC Davis is asked to try to solve this murder by a friend.

She’s a lawyer, she’s a friend who’s a judge, and it’s her husband who has been killed. And they wonder like, is it someone he does this debunking of psychics? Is it somebody that he exposed that came after him, or of course there are other suspects as well in other parts of his life. And the Prague part, I just had such fun with, oh, the character’s going to get out of Chicago mostly she’s in Chicago, she’s going to get out and go somewhere else. And how would that be for her as not a world traveler? She has a friend who does a lot of world travel, so you know, it’s her taking her along and being like, “Hey, this’ll be fine. We’ll do this.”

Jo: Oh, cool. Oh, well I’m glad you got to weave it in. Where can people find you and your books online?

Lisa: You can find my fiction and nonfiction and my podcast, which is about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and story, at lisalilly.com

Jo: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Lisa. That was great.

Lisa: Thank you. It was great to be on with you.

The post Alchemical History And Beautiful Architecture: Prague With Lisa M Lilly appeared first on Books And Travel.

In this conversation from the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast with Natalie Maclean, award-winning author J.F. Penn discusses the inspiration for her folk horror novel Blood Vintage, set in the vineyards of Somerset, England.

We explore the dark side of viticulture, from poisonous plants and blood sacrifices to the hard realities of small-scale winemaking and the mysterious practices of biodynamic agriculture.

J.F. Penn is the award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, short stories, and travel memoir. Jo lives in Bath, England and enjoys a nice G&T.

• New Zealand wine memories. Pinot Noir tours in South Otago, including Mount Difficulty and Peregrine Vineyard, paired with wild venison and legendary Bluff oysters
• The birth of Blood Vintage. How a tour of Woodchester Valley vineyard, frost candles, and a note in the ancient Domesday Book sparked a dark story
• English wine’s climate change renaissance. How warming temperatures are making England’s sparkling wines competitive with Champagne.
• Inside biodynamic winemaking, inspired by a visit to Limeburn Hill Vineyard, Chew Magna, Somerset. From burying cow horns to dynamisation rituals and creating a self-contained ecosystem
• The dangers and romance of viticulture, and for more on this, check out the interview with Caro Feely, The Taste of Place.
• Folk horror and the ‘terroir’ of terror. Exploring the question at the heart of the book: What would you sacrifice to create (or taste) the perfect vintage?

You can find Blood Vintage on all platforms in all formats now.

This discussion was first broadcast across two episodes on Unreserved Wine Talk with Natalie Maclean in Oct 2024 [Blending biodynamics and suspense; Wine and folklore]. You can also watch the full interview on video.

Transcript of the interview

Natalie: Jo (J.F.) Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of horror, thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, and travel memoir, as well as short stories. She’s also an award-winning podcaster. Her podcast is amazing, by the way—The Creative Penn. I listen to it every week, and you should too, if you have any interest in books or reading.

She has a Master’s in Theology from the University of Oxford, and her latest novel is called Blood Vintage. It’s a folk horror story set in an English vineyard. I just finished reading it and it’s wonderful, Jo.

You are joining us now from your home in Bath, which is nestled in the beautiful countryside of Somerset, England, about a hundred miles west of London. Welcome, Jo. I’m so glad you’re here with us.

Jo: Oh, I’m so excited, Natalie. An excuse to drink wine with a friend!

New Zealand Wine Experiences

Natalie: Before we dive into your book, tell us about the Pinot Noir tours and festivals in the South Otago region that you attended while you were living in New Zealand.

Jo: I lived in New Zealand for six years, from 2000 to 2006. It was one of those mid-twenties “go backpacking, fall in love, stay, get married, get divorced, get remarried” stories. You understand?

Natalie: Oh wow, you were busy!

Jo: Yes, exactly. But I did a Pinot Noir tour in South Otago, and it is quite a famous region for the Pinot Noir grape. I wanted to tell you about two particular vineyards. One is called Mount Difficulty, which is a wonderful name in that region because the mountains—the Remarkables—are really high and it’s a pretty hardcore walking region, skiing region in the winter. And the other one is called Peregrine Vineyard.

It’s a beautiful region for the nature, but Peregrine have created this incredible architecture. The roof of the winery is shaped like the wings of a peregrine falcon, and I particularly remember that tour. For people who don’t know, it’s out of Queenstown in the very southeast of New Zealand. So it’s really far south. Gets very cold in the winter, but highly recommended.

And you are the best at pairing, but I was going to pair it with New Zealand wild venison, which is something you get a lot of around there. Have you tasted the New Zealand Pinots?

Natalie: Oh, I love them. New Zealand is better known for Sauvignon Blanc, but I think the Pinot Noirs are even more spectacular. They’ve got this nervy, edgy acidity that I love. It’s almost like the wine vibrates in your glass, and it’s so food-friendly because acidity is to wine what salt is to food. It brings forward flavor. Gorgeous wines, absolutely.

Jo: Since you mentioned the Sauvignon Blanc, I also wanted to recommend a very specific New Zealand oyster as a pairing with that, which is the Bluff oyster. And I think you like oysters, right?

Natalie: I write about them, yeah. It’s the one thing I can’t get past—it’s a texture thing. But anyway.

Jo: Okay, for people who love oysters who are listening, I love oysters. I’ve eaten oysters all over the world, and the Bluff oyster in New Zealand has a very short winter season, but it is incredible to me. It is the best, and I have a vivid memory of drinking a Sauvignon Blanc with a Bluff oyster—maybe a whole dozen oysters—on Lake Wakatipu in the winter sun. So I highly recommend that pairing as well, and it’s very hard to get them anywhere else in the world.

Natalie: Oh wow. I’ll have to make a note of that. My husband likes oysters, so we’ll do that. I love that. Great evocative image there that carries through with your book.

Introducing Blood Vintage

Natalie: So let’s set the stage for your book, Blood Vintage. You did a serious amount of research into biodynamic winemaking and winemaking generally. Before we talk about that, maybe share the overview of the book story with us, please.

Jo: This is the back of the book. Blood Vintage is a special edition, so I shall read it for you:

The perfect vintage requires the darkest sacrifice.

In the rolling hills of Somerset, England, an ancient evil ripens alongside the grapes of Standing Stones Cellars. Rebecca Langford never expected her architectural career to lead to the secluded rural village of Windbridge Hollow. But after a violent clash with eco-activists, she flees the chaos of London, desperate for a new start.

She seeks refuge at Standing Stone Cellars, a vineyard renowned for its award-winning wines and mysterious history, nestled in the shadow of ancient oaks and standing stones that have watched over the land for millennia.

But this vineyard is no sanctuary. From the primal fires of Beltane to the chilling shadow of Samhain, Rebecca finds herself ensnared in an ancient cycle of sacrifice and rebirth. The disappearance of her fellow workers, amidst evidence of blood rites, forces her to confront a horrifying truth: Standing Stone’s exceptional vintage is nourished by more than just sunlight and soil.

As the veil between worlds grows thin, Rebecca must make an impossible choice: embrace the dark legacy of the vineyard and secure her place amongst its guardians, or risk becoming the next offering to the insatiable horned god that demands his due.

Blood Vintage is an atmospheric descent into folk horror where the line between sacred and profane blurs with each sip of wine. Lose yourself in a world where pagan ritual and modern ambitions collide, and discover the terrible price of belonging in a place where the very earth demands blood.”

Natalie: Ooh, I love that. That is such a great description that really captures it—so atmospheric, so dark and brooding, and yet, bonus for us who love wine, wine is running right through it, woven into it.

Wine Pairings for the Book

Natalie: Before we dive into that, I’m itching to get there. You selected a wine to pair with your book, as have I. So let’s hear about yours first. What is it?

Jo: Yes, the blood vintage itself would be the Samhain wine from Limeburn Hill Vineyard. We’re going to come back to that, but that’s really hard to get. So I’ve gone with the Pinot Rosé from Woodchester Valley, which is where the original idea came from. I love a rosé, and we’ll obviously talk about where this has come from. I have my glass ready. This has been chilled. Woodchester Valley, Pinot Rosé—and I read about it, it’s 100% Pinot Précoce, the early Pinot Noir.

Natalie: Oh, lovely. I love a rosé. I’ve chosen a more brooding, darker wine for you and your book. This is from Italy because we just don’t get many English wines here in Canada. But this one, the label has a woman and her hair is in flames because fire is a metaphor, but also the sun. Stars are all around her.

It comes from the Donna Fugata winery in Italy, which means “fugitive woman” or “woman on the run,” which I think Rebecca is a little bit—from her architectural career and she’s escaping out to the countryside with the vineyards. Anyway, lots of metaphors, but I love the labels on this.

So let’s have a sip to get going here. Cheers!

Jo: Oh, you have a goblet there!

Natalie: Yes, my special glass. I bought this 20 years ago. I was in Prague with a friend of mine. It was winter, and I saw these glasses. I drank a lot more red wine at the time, and I was like, this is perfect, I love these. And this is one of those times where, you know, I’m backpacking—do I really want to take glass anywhere? But we had such a lovely trip, and these memories of drinking together are important. So that’s the story of the glass. I know it’s not perfect for rosé, we’re not going to get technical here.

Natalie: But for those who want to know, an ideal glass is clear and has a big enough bowl so that you can swirl it. But I love the goblet. Very atmospheric, very apt. Very blood vintage!

Jo: Very gothic. That’s lovely.

Natalie: Okay, tell us what drew you to this story in the first place. Where were you? Oh wait, I haven’t had a sip yet. Okay, yes.

Jo: Oh, it’s really tasty. It’s very strawberry. You are much better at these tasting notes than I am, but I can definitely taste strawberries.

Natalie: Strawberries, absolutely. That is the essence of a good, fresh rosé. It makes your mouth water. It’s like fresh berries, sunshine, and the opposite of the mood of your book. Although your book is not a downer, it’s just very gripping and thrilling.

The Origin Story at Woodchester Valley

Natalie: So tell us more about where this idea came to you.

Jo: Yes, Woodchester Valley is a small vineyard. Most of the vineyards in England are smaller, although they’re getting bought up as many of these things do. But this is a small one, and the Cotswolds is in the southwest of England. It’s an area of outstanding natural beauty, which is a distinction of certain areas, and you would absolutely recognize it. It’s the kind of chocolate-box England with the green rolling hills—lots of green because it does rain—but also sunnier. There are lots of stone buildings, cows wandering around. It’s pastoral, but also enough hills.

I went to Woodchester Valley with my dad and my stepmom. My husband drove, so my dad and my stepmom and I drank, and we went to the vineyard. It was July, so the grapes were tiny little green bits—they weren’t full yet. Excuse my language, which is not perfect.

Natalie: That’s okay. You’re a fiction writer, not a wine writer. So that’s all good.

Jo: I describe it better in writing than in spoken words. But anyway, we went there for a wine tasting. And one of the first things they said was this area of vines was south-facing and it was beautiful. And they told us about the frost candles—the bougies, I think they’re called—where in the winter, they get these beeswax candles that are very good for the environment. They put them in amongst the vines to stop the frost and to stop them killing the bud break, I think it’s called.

And I was like, oh my goodness. In my mind I could see the frost candles and I had some story going off in my brain. So that was one little thing.

And then we walked past the crushing equipment and the bottling thing where they do the pétillant naturel, I think it is, and they turn the bottles. And I was like, oh, that could explode.

Jo: And then they told us about this ancient part of the vineyard that they own where we couldn’t visit. And I was like, ooh, I’ve got to know about that.

And it turns out—this is owned by a female vineyard owner, Fiona—she found a mention of this area in the Domesday Book. If you don’t know, it’s an 11th-century document that was essentially a tax record so they could tax people on land. And there’s a vineyard in this area from the 11th century. And so I was like, oh my goodness. And then of course, the Romans brought vines to this area. So in my mind I was like, there has to be some ancient ritual in this place. That’s where it came from.

Natalie: Oh, that’s marvelous. And you were already painting a picture with all those visuals and the mystery, the history, everything.

The Rise of English Wines

Natalie: So say a little bit more before we continue about the rise of English wines. Of course, climate change means a lot of marginal wine-growing regions are getting warmer and therefore it’s easier to ripen grapes. As I said, we rarely get them here in Canada yet. Hopefully we will in the future. But how large is the industry? What’s going on?

Jo: Yeah, what’s going on? Basically, as you mentioned, climate change. They told us this in the Woodchester tour—that the climate here now in the south of England is the same as the Champagne-growing region in France. So it’s English sparkling wines that are winning the awards, and in fact, in blind tastings, they’re often beating out some of those French sparklings.

And what’s also interesting is French vineyards are buying up land and vineyards here in England because as climate change happens, they’re looking for new vineyards.

But I did look up the numbers. It’s 8 to 10 million bottles out of the UK and around 800 tiny vineyards. And I looked up Canada, so you are 60 to 70 million bottles. So we are like a sixth of the Canadian output, but obviously you’ve got a much, much bigger country.

Natalie: We do, yes.

Jo: But compared to New Zealand, obviously New Zealand is a tiny country and has a huge wine industry, and it’s a lot bigger than both Canada and England. So I’m hoping that over time, one of the benefits of climate change might mean more English wine. But now if you go to English pubs, wine bars, you can buy English wine, it’s in the supermarkets. So I hope that you can get some over there.

Natalie: That’d be great. And I’ve heard they’re even planting vineyards in Scotland these days.

Jo: Yes, there’s one, a biodynamic vineyard in Wales as well, near where I am.

Jo: But just to come back to the Romans, because I think this is really interesting for people and why the spirit of the land is so important here—the Romans brought vines here between 43 AD and 400 AD, 1,600-2,000 years ago. And in fact, where I live in Bath, it used to be called Aquae Sulis. We have a 2,000-year-old Roman bath in the center of my city. So the land where I stand and where these vines are and where the book is set have this ancient history that’s now coming back to life.

Natalie: Yeah. All the ancient relics being discovered and buried in some of these vineyards and so on.

The Performance of The Bacchae

Natalie: So back to your story at Woodchester Valley. They mentioned you couldn’t go in that part of the vineyard, which of course immediately sparked curiosity and probably the desire to go in that vineyard. You said it also reminded you of a performance of The Bacchae. Tell us about that. What’s the connection?

Jo: Yeah, so that night—and of course my dad and me and my stepmom, we drank a few of the wines, we tasted in a proper way and no spitting—that night I remembered, it’s funny how these memories come back to you. I remembered a performance of The Bacchae, which is an ancient Greek tragedy, again, many thousands of years old. And in it, Bacchus—Greek god of wine and fertility and all these kind of wonderful things—and in it, the worshipers of Bacchus in a ritual, they go mad essentially, and they rip apart a man instead of a deer.

And this kind of gave me another thought about these sort of pagan rituals that go on around wine. And again, in our Western society, we have Christianity and Judaism, both of which use wine in religious ritual. So using wine in religious ritual as a sacrament is normal for most people. But in terms of taking it further into where you are on a different plane of consciousness, I just thought this was super interesting.

Also, the fertility stuff and the vines and wild nature. I love wild nature. I think it’s fascinating. You’ve been in these vineyards all over the place, and it’s the wild sections that I find really interesting because they might be all manicured in places, and then there’s these kind of bits that are fascinating. And it’s a perfect symbol.

Natalie: For the balance in life between restraint and thinking, and the wildness, the fierceness of nature and the body—the mind versus the body. All the metaphors are working for you in this one. That’s fantastic. And where were you watching that play? It was back when you were a high school student, right?

Jo: Yes. And I think that’s why it’s funny when these memories emerge, and there’s a kind of human brain thing, isn’t it? You think about something and it sparks something else. Yeah, I studied Greek, ancient Greek and Latin and classical civilization when I was 14 to 16. And then I went on and did theology, and reading ancient Greek was very useful.

But we went to see this performance at an actual replica of a Roman amphitheater, and it was performed in ancient Greek. And I still remember it very vividly. It was at another school, and it’s one of those occasions where you think if I was watching it now, I’d be very cynical and I’d be like, that’s a bit crap, like school kids doing a performance. But in my mind and in my memory, it was so powerful to see what happened in this ceremony. And so it really stuck in my mind.

The Dangers of Winemaking

Jo: And I have another podcast called Books and Travel, and I interviewed a vintner, Caro from Chateau Feely in France, and she was telling me about all the different ways that you can get injured and die in a vineyard. And that kind of came into my head as well, that all these things mush together when you are a writer and they pop out at different times and one thing sparks another.

Natalie: And wine itself is all about the smell, and smell is tied to memory. It’s going to touch off like a spark point, bringing you right back to a place or a time. It’s very powerful.

Okay, you just said she was talking about all the ways to die, so wine lovers also have grim imaginations, especially if we’ve got a bad bottle or something. But tell us about all the ways you discussed with Carly about the ways you could die in a vineyard, so we know what to watch out for on our next trip to a winery.

Jo: I think she was talking about how people—it was the idea of blood. You can get cut on quite a lot of these equipment, pruning things. And the machines that go through the vineyard, if you use them, and the shot—the glass. Even the glass and shattering of glass, the bottles. Sparkling wine can explode in the cellar. And in fact, that was one of my rewrites—the exploding of the wine that gets turned in the riddling rack, I think it’s called, isn’t it?

Natalie: Yeah, it is.

Jo: Which is cool. And then in those wine barrel rooms, one of those could slip, and some of those are super heavy barrels. You could definitely get crushed under one.

Natalie: And people have been known to fall into vats and not drown, but actually asphyxiate because it’s all CO2, and it’s quite deadly to be around a winery. I never thought about it that way, but you’re right. And the bottles, they can explode because they’re under pressure. The bubbles create the pressure. It’s 90 pounds per square inch—the equal of city bus tires—and it’s going under a second fermentation, adding more and more pressure under that glass. So if that’s not solid, you get exploding bottles for sure.

Jo: Yeah. And it’s very interesting because obviously I’m an author and I sit at my desk and I don’t have much that can kill me in my day job. But I just love researching all this. And I think one of the things that really came home to me in doing this research and going to vineyards was it’s such hard work. It’s seriously hard work. There’s this romance about, “Oh, when I get rich I’ll just have a vineyard or whatever.” And it’s so much work. And then also so much investment in all the equipment and all the things you need. And I think that really impressed upon me how difficult it was, but also how tired these people must be during the harvest time and all that. And yes, be careful out there in your vineyard.

Natalie: Absolutely. And we share a personal trainer, so this is just bringing to mind the hard physical work of a vineyard. I always thought you could design a workout program around wine, so you’d have abs of stainless steel.

Jo: I’ve got a bit of a workout here on my arm. That’s biceps, right?

Natalie: Thanks, Dan!

Discovering Limeburn Hill Biodynamic Vineyard

Natalie: But so you live an hour’s drive away from one of England’s few biodynamic vineyards. Tell us about that.

Jo: So this is really special. Limeburn Hill Vineyard, biodynamic, and it is certified. And I know you’ve had someone on the show to talk about biodynamics quite recently. In fact, I was listening to that earlier.

But essentially this is in the Chew Magna area near me. It’s again limestone. The Romans were working in that area. So again, very ancient land. It has 3,000 vines, hand-planted. It’s run by a couple, Robin Snowden and Georgina Harvey, and I went and spent a day there. I did a course on biodynamic wine growing, and it was full of wine people. And then I was like, “I’m writing a novel.” And Robin was very patient with me, especially when I said, “Oh, where do you bury the bones?” He was like, “Okay, I’ll show you.”

The Wines Named After Celtic Festivals

Jo: But I think what’s—first of all, their wines are pétillant naturel, I think that’s it. It’s a lightly fizzy wine, fermented in the bottle. And their wines, they have three wines named after those festivals: Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain. So these are Celtic festivals. And so I saw, and one’s a white, one’s an orange rosé, and one is the red—the Samhain, the winter wine, which I think is Pinot Noir.

And so I went there and I saw these wines and that gave me ideas. But then also they explained what biodynamics is and the Rudolf Steiner method of really just the holistic view of the vineyard as a contained ecosystem. And they were taking this very seriously.

So they had wild bees because it’s all the natural yeast in the area. There’s no extra stuff they do. They have these little sheep that run around eating things—lamb mowers. Wildflowers. And I was just super impressed by, again, how much work this is, but also the ecosystem of the land. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful, a wonderful day. And again, the sort of romantic idea, but he demonstrated the biodynamization, they call it, which is a stirring thing where they stir for a minute in one direction and then the other direction. And he had the books out with all the sun and the moon and the planting and the energies that go into it. And this was all just fascinating to me.

That is Limeburn Hill Vineyard, and they do tours and courses and things. Again, their wine is very hard to get. It’s served at a lot of independent restaurants, cafés, and things like that. But they’re fascinating.

And I should say there was no sacrifice.

Natalie: Yeah, I was going to say—

Jo: No blood sacrifice, no “You can’t go into that part of the vineyard, that’s where our former tasting-room staff members are buried.”

Natalie: Right!

Jo: But they did honor the land. They had an area which was a kind of sacred area, a sacred grove. And obviously there is the place where they bury the horns, and there are some preparations with skulls and things. So there’s just some weird stuff going on in biodynamics. But fascinating.

Understanding Biodynamic Preparations

Natalie: Yeah, absolutely. So just say a little bit more, if you remember it from your course—they bury the bull’s horns and the skulls and put things in them?

Jo: Yes. So I do remember, Preparation 500 is the cow horn. So each of these preparations are made from animal parts—stomachs, bladders, intestines, skulls. And then you fill them with manure or certain plants like yarrow, chamomile, different things. And that should be growing on your land as well. So it’s all a contained ecosystem.

And then you basically bury the horns in the winter, or the skulls you put in a wet place, like under some running water. And then after a certain amount of time, it gives you some stuff like compost, and then you put that in the dynamization and you turn it into a tea, and then you spray it on either the roots or the leaves or whatever you need.

They also use quartz. And if anyone listening is like, “Oh, she’s butchering this,” what’s so fascinating is you might think, oh, that is just weird, strange stuff. But when you think about the vineyard as an ecosystem and the real terroir, the sense of place that they’re trying to put into every single drop of the wine, why would you bring in something from the outside? And then the natural way of making these sprays and these treatments.

And Robin was saying very much that you go out and you get to know the vine, and you look at it and you’re like, okay, this needs some more moisture, or this needs some more whatever. And then you use the preparation that will go with what the land needs. And it can take a long time to get the land back up to what it should be.

In fact, he said there were no worms in the soil when they started.

Natalie: Wow, so it’s dead, the vineyard—

Jo: The microbial life was just dead.

Natalie: Yeah.

Jo: Exactly. And it took them several years, although I think he said it was quicker than expected, until the earth is just chock-full of worms. It’s like the vines had to go to rehab and get off their drugs—their fungicides and pesticides.

Natalie: Had to detox. Yes, that’s the thing.

Jo: And they planted that vineyard, so I guess they got the vines and put them there. But I just thought that was fascinating because the idea of the land itself is what I’m so fascinated with—how we feed the land to make the land then feed us. And this is something that just really interests me.

Tasting Biodynamic Wines

Natalie: Absolutely. And for whatever you believe with the astrological signs and some of the aspects of biodynamics, I think it can’t be faulted overall because it means that those who engage in those practices really have to pay attention, as you say, to the land. They really have to look at each vine almost individually and say, what does this need? And the more closely you pay attention to vines and winemaking, the better your wine will be, as opposed to mass harvests and mass spraying. Some vineyards that are not even organic, which is a step down from biodynamics, are sprayed 25 times or more over the course of just one vintage. I’m all for biodynamics.

Jo: I did want to ask you on this because I did taste—I did some tasting, I was driving, so I did spit—and it was very unusual. It was a very unusual wine. And of course every single bottle is different, not just every vintage is different. And given you are a better taster than me, how would you describe the difference between a biodynamic-tasting wine and the wine I’ve got here, the Woodchester, which is not?

Natalie: So you have regular wines, and then you have organic, you have biodynamic. Everything that organic wines are, biodynamic must be, plus there’s not going to be as many sulfites—preservatives—in organic or biodynamic as regular wines. But I think we exaggerate just how sensitive we might be. It’s only about 5% of the population that are really sensitive to sulfites, and a glass of orange juice on average has more sulfites than a whole bottle of wine.

So one major difference will be the sulfite content. But apart from that, I think in a blind tasting, I’m not sure that I could say that’s a biodynamic and that’s not—unless I was comparing a really mass-commercial wine that’s made like breakfast cereal. But then they’re going to be at two very different price points, and you’d have to control for all the factors. You’d have to have the same grape, the same region, and compare this vineyard wine biodynamic to that one that is not. But I doubt that I could really differentiate them, other than I would hope the biodynamic—they can be funky and a little weird.

Jo: Yes, funky is a great word.

Natalie: Sometimes. And then you start to veer into another category that’s not defined at all, at least legally—natural and raw wines, which are not the same, just like all stallions are horses, but not all horses are stallions. I can pick out sometimes more obviously what is a natural wine because it will have no, zero preservatives, and sometimes they can get quite funky.

Jo: Yeah. I do remember it being interesting or funky, like you say. I think you have to be very open to new things to try. It’s not, “Oh, here’s my favorite rosé,” or “Here’s my bottle of Prosecco on a Saturday night” or whatever. That’s not that kind of wine.

Recommended Reading on Biodynamics

Jo: But I did also want to mention a book called Voodoo Vintners by Katherine Cole, which is about Oregon’s biodynamic vineyards. And I used that heavily in my research, and again, fascinating. And the Demeter USA is the certification board. It’s incredible how high the standard is. There’s a lot of places using biodynamics, but they’re not certified because it’s such a high standard. I just encourage people, because again, I’m not a taster like you, a super taster, but to try these different wines. It is very interesting and supports the vineyard, which again, it is very hard to have a business as a small vineyard.

Natalie: I think it is. They’re generally small family farms, and there’s no economy of scale. There’s a few big conglomerates in each country. But the other thing is that they say on average, organic viticulture costs you 15% more, and then biodynamic another 15% on top of that because you can’t resort to pesticides, fungicides, and insecticides. Yeah, it is definitely worth seeking them out.

Wine Tourism Opportunities

Jo: Also, I was going to say on this, both these vineyards—so Limeburn Hill does courses, they do weekends, they do hen dos and stuff like that, but Woodchester has accommodation as well, so you can stay there actually in the vineyard. And so I think that’s really nice, and I enjoy that. I can spend more money in a vineyard by doing activities. So I think that’s actually something to consider. It’s not just—you don’t have to just go and do a tasting. You can actually do tours or stay places. So yeah, I enjoy that.

Natalie: Absolutely. Wine travel is just burgeoning because, as you say, you can taste the wine, but often there’ll be a restaurant attached to the winery or restaurants locally that’ll do wine and food pairings for you. There’s all sorts of things to do from spas to ballooning to biking to things for the kids—not the wine, but—

Jo: No, start your kids’ tolerance early.

Natalie: I did not mean that seriously!

What Surprised You Most in Your Research?

Natalie: Okay, so that’s really interesting. So what was the most surprising thing that you learned about biodynamics or winemaking or wine itself while you were writing the book?

Jo: Again, I think I’ll come back to how hard people are working. And how badly wrong it can go. I think when I wrote the scene about the frost in the vineyard, I really understood as I was researching that this can destroy a huge proportion of a crop. That there are things that can go horribly wrong that can just destroy the whole thing.

And I know that can happen with other farmers, but often other farmers have other crops going on, and these vineyards, they really only have the one. And so it was incredible to me how on a knife edge and how you have to look after them. Or it might be a swarm of insects, or it might be something—a flood. There’s so many things.

So yeah, that was interesting to me. And also, again, how much variability. I think as someone who enjoys wine but has perhaps just taken it for granted—I can just go and get a bottle of rosé or whatever—and then you see the variability between the areas. So again, these vineyards are about an hour and a half apart in a car. So in the big scheme of things, they’re not that far away, but they’re really very different. So again, that idea of terroir really came home to me.

But I certainly am taking viticulture a lot more seriously now than I did before. And I hope in the book, it’s not a book for viticulture people, it’s the setting. But I do care very much about my research.

Natalie: No, you do it so well. But you are right. People have that dreamy vision of owning a vineyard, but really it’s fancied-up farming. It’s hard work, calloused hands and sunburnt and all the rest of it. It’s not just what is portrayed on wine labels and wine advertising. It really is grassroots hard work.

The Social Aspect of Wine

Jo: Yeah. The passion of it is incredible, but also it makes you think a lot more about what wine is. And I know you talk about this, that there’s a lot of myths and there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on and a lot of amazing stuff. But at the end of the day, it’s like having a glass of wine with a friend or as part of a group or your family. My family are drinkers, so wine plays a big part. And in fact, Woodchester is just down the road, so we do get wine from there. And that’s what it’s about. It’s about the times we have with wine for most of us whose job it isn’t. But I think that’s what it comes down to really.

Natalie: Absolutely. It’s the drink of conversation. It’s meant to be consumed slowly. It’s why we don’t serve wine in shooter glasses and just knock it back. Although sometimes maybe you feel in the mood for that, but really it is about communion and joining people together over conversation.

Exploring the Concept of Terroir

Natalie: You’ve mentioned terroir a few times, and in the version that I had, I counted 17 mentions. So what does terroir mean to you? You’ve said sense of place—maybe you can expand on that.

Jo: It’s a unique sense of place based on the geography, but also what’s under the earth. So I learned a lot about the limestone that this area is on and how that affects the soil. I didn’t know anything about soil before this. The weather—so the rain, what happens with the sun, what direction the slopes are on. You don’t buy a piece of land without considering where you are planting the grapes and what you feed the soil, obviously.

And I loved it—Limeburn, they just let the wildflowers grow. And by the third season of wildflowers, they had some ridiculous number, like 40 different types of wildflowers growing in amongst the vines that these little sheep were going around and eating and then pooing, and that was the whole thing.

And you say in your book, Wine Witch on Fire—your wonderful memoir—that terroir is like a writer’s voice. And I love that as a metaphor because it’s distinctive, it’s personal. If you know a writer and you get to know their voice, then it’s, yeah, this book, Blood Vintage, it’s a J.F. Penn book. And if you like it, you’ll like my other books because that’s my voice. And terroir, it’s just fascinating to me. And super tasters like yourself can tell where a wine is from and maybe even what fields and what particular types of grapes, and that’s just incredible.

Terroir and Terror

Jo: But also terroir sounds a bit like terror. And I did look this up. They are not from the same etymology. It’s terra as in earth for terroir, and for terror, it’s from terrere, which is “frightened.” But they sound pretty similar.

Natalie: Yes. And you’ve been able to weave them in so nicely together in the book. I always thought that because we talk about sometimes in the wine world, “terroirists,” which always sounds like “terrorists.” What are these people doing, making deadly Cabernet or whatever? There’s no real hard and fast definition, but they often are deep into the land and they make tiny bits of wine or amounts of wine. Sometimes we call them “garagistes,” which started in France because they have their winemaking facilities in their garage because their amounts were so small. So it’s more sort of a wine warrior status—I am really a purist when it comes to terroir. Nothing should interfere with it. There should be no intervention, although you have to get the grapes to ferment, so there has to be a little bit done.

Jo: That’s quite funny because I did say to Robin at Limeburn Hill, “So where do you get all your cow horns? Because I don’t see any cows.” And he did say, “We do have to order those from the biodynamic store.” But everything else, they had the patches of yarrow growing and chamomile and all the different herbs and all the different plants were all growing there. And so they tried very much to keep everything within the ecosystem. And then even they do make a spirit from the grapes, the final press or something like that, the skins. So they use everything they can. It’s a real commitment to this thing.

The Sensual Nature of Wine Writing

Natalie: It absolutely is. Again, I’ve said this a few times, but your writing is so sensual. You could easily be a wine writer, and beyond the whole string of grapes and descriptors, it’s very evocative. How did you really dig down to get all of that? Or is it just part of your toolkit? You’re such a sensual, visual writer.

Jo: I do take a lot of photos, so I have a lot of photos from those vineyards. But I also do a lot of visual research online. And also I mine sites like yours for words to describe stuff, because I have not been in a vineyard at dawn when the frost comes. And I do feel like that scene, I spent a lot of time on that scene because I was like, this is so important.

And also I do think there is a magic, and Rebecca, the main character, has just arrived from London where she doesn’t even see the stars because of the lights of the big city. And she’s there, it’s the middle of the night, they’ve rung a bell like “We have to save the buds.” So they’re putting out these candles and she’s looking up and there’s the stars. And I was like, I have to capture this. And so I spent a lot of time—there’s a lot of images online of vineyards with frost candles, and they did show me some at Limeburn Hill.

And so I think for me it’s very much about research and then it’s about point of view and taking it further. But at the end of the day, it is fiction. And of course some people were like, “It is not romantic at all to put out the frost candles because everyone’s crazy and it has to be done quickly and it’s scary.” And I do romanticize it. But I do think the sensuality is, as you say, the sensory detail of the writing in a vineyard in particular is so important because people like yourself as well—you’re taste people, you’re smell people, you’re sight people. And so that’s, I guess, what I’m trying to write.

Natalie: Absolutely, and you did.

And back to those candles, some other wineries use windmills, but just raising the temperature even one to two degrees can save vines when it’s that marginal and the frost has come. So it is very much like that. But the windmill wouldn’t have been as evocative.

Jo: No, that’s true. Yeah, that’s mechanical and machine-like.

Natalie: But yeah, the bougies, I can imagine the smoke and everything else. It reminds me of that movie, A Walk in the Clouds with Keanu Reeves. I’m probably mucking that up as well, but they were talking about the vineyard catching on fire.

Jo: I do have some fire in the book!

Natalie: Yes, you do. Absolutely. Fire’s a good metaphor too in the book.

Inspiration from Drops of God

Natalie: And another inspiration was the television show Drops of God, which is based on a book of the same name. Is that a show or a book that you would suggest we read as wine lovers?

Jo: Oh, you have to watch it. Maybe if you are a wine person it’s not as good, but as a non-wine person, I was like, it was amazing. So basically also, it’s French-Japanese, so it’s partly in French, partly in Japanese.

And essentially this wine critic—someone like yourself who’s been writing about wine for a long time—has a huge wine cellar and has collected wine their whole life. And it’s very prestigious and it’s worth millions, this wine cellar. And there are two people, so there’s his daughter and then his student, his kind of apprentice. And they have to do a competition.

So there are five bottles and they’re allowed one taste, and then they can come back a week later and have one more taste, and then they write the name of the wine, the year, the vintage, all that. And then whoever wins three out of five wins the whole collection.

But each week they’re flying around the world, looking at all the vineyards, trying to work out—they’re tasting the soil, they’re examining all the crops to try and work out what the hell this wine is. And of course, they’re all really obscure, and then they have to get the year as well. So it’s a fascinating sort of wine mystery.

But at its heart it’s also about family and about culture shock and about just those things that wine can smooth over. So the Japanese and the French vineyards is really interesting. So yeah, Drops of God. It is fantastic. Absolutely recommend it.

Natalie: I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll have to put that on my playlist. It’s beautiful as well.

Jo: It’s Apple TV, so it is beautiful.

Natalie: Excellent. Oh yeah, they’re always shot beautifully.

Understanding Folk Horror

Natalie: And another inspiration, of course, is folklore itself, because I wasn’t familiar with folk horror. Maybe you can tell us a bit more of the folklore aspects of the book.

Jo: Yeah, so folklore is more the traditional beliefs and rituals and little superstitious things that happen around a certain area. So again, it’s all terroir-based and it’s rooted in the community. It’s rooted in the physical location.

So for example, here in the Southwest and in fact in England, we have May Day bank holiday, which is the 1st of May, which is a Beltane fertility festival. And children dance around maypoles with ribbons. And maypoles are just these very large phallic symbols, let’s say, where beautiful young ladies are meant to dance around them with ribbons—obviously fertility symbols. There’s a lot of bonfires. People jump over bonfires.

And then we have Morris dancing, which is a sort of folk dancing where people dress up. And I put this dark Morris dancing troupe into my book where they wear crow feathers and black hats, and they wear slashed black makeup. And sometimes they’re hitting—they hit sticks together. Sometimes blackthorn logs, which have spiritual meanings, or sometimes Brussels sprouts.

Natalie: The vegetable?

Jo: Yes, the vegetable! They hit together sticks full of Brussels sprouts and they fall around. It’s very weird to do with the vegetable. Yes, it’s very odd. And every single Morris dancing area has different rituals and different things.

Ancient Symbols in Modern Britain

Jo: We also have the Green Man, which is a face of, again, a fertility god covered in vine leaves or other leaves, oak leaves. And it’s in a lot of our cathedrals, so thousand-year-old medieval cathedrals have the Green Man in Christian places—the fertility symbols.

And then the horned god, the Wild Hunt, because we have a lot of stag hunting back in the olden times here. So I think it’s really interesting.

But I was looking up where you live in Ottawa, right? So one of your folklore stories is about the Wendigo, the spirit of cannibalism. Did you know about that?

Natalie: No! My God, I hope my neighbors aren’t practicing that, but it’s interesting.

Jo: Yeah, it’s very interesting. The Wendigo from the First Nations people—it often comes from the older indigenous peoples. There’s also the Loup-garou, the French-Canadian werewolf, which is also in your area.

So if people are interested, these stories, they’re so ancient and they emerge in modern culture. So even that Limeburn Hill names their wines after pagan festivals that are still celebrated by neo-pagans or just reflected. Samhain is the 31st of October, it’s Halloween, so the veil is thin. It’s the time for winter to come in. The dead are honored. This happens in every culture. It’s just they’re called different things. But yeah, folklore is fascinating. And because it’s so specific to place, again, I wanted to bring that in and again, the terroir.

Natalie: Yeah, absolutely. And of course you live in Bath, which is where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, so your city has a horror pedigree. So what is folk horror? Because I think yours was the first horror book I read, and I think of slasher movies like Friday the 13th, very gory. But what is folk horror?

Defining Folk Horror

Jo: Oh, I’m thrilled that you read it because a lot of people say, “I don’t read horror, so I’m not going to read that.” It’s like people saying, “I don’t like Chardonnay, so I’m not going to drink that wine.”

Natalie: Open your minds, people!

Jo: Not all Chardonnays are alike.

Natalie: Yes!

Jo: But yeah. Yes. But it’s the idea of folk horror. So again, we mentioned folklore, and then horror is so wide, it’s a very wide genre. So I’m more of a supernatural horror type of person. It’s a lot more about suspense and slow burn kind of feeling. You are in this really quite eerie situation. And is that a blood sacrifice, or is that something normal in this area? That kind of thing. It’s this feeling out of place. It’s an outsider coming into an isolated community feeling, “I don’t know if this is right or not”—the pagan festivals, the wine, all of that.

But to me, the horror that I also bring to it, and this is an interesting question: Is it worth giving a human life? So is it worth sacrificing a human life to the land? The human life is so short and this land lives so much longer than us and produces something so wonderful. So the blood vintage is so wonderful. Is it worth the sacrifice to make art? Basically.

And this comes up across human history—is it worth sacrifice to make art? And this is what I come back to in horror. And perhaps the real horror is sometimes we might say yes.

Natalie: If it’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the famous Pinot Noir from Burgundy, I’ll kill anybody to get it!

So I love that. But we also as artists, writers, whatever, give up a lot of our lives to create what we do. We’re perhaps not out there as much as other people and so on. So there is a little small death, sacrifice going on with if you want to create anything decent. But yeah, no, that’s a great question. I’ll be thinking about that over the weekend: Is it worth it?

The Heart of the Story

Jo: Well, I think that to me, the real horror and the question at the heart of the book is: What will she choose? Because you’re basically offered being part of this community. She doesn’t have a community, she doesn’t have a family, and she’s offered a part of this wonderful vineyard with these amazing things going on. And a lot of it is amazing, right? It is just wonderful. And then it’s what will I give to be part of this? And what will I give to make this wine? Or what will I give to drink this wine?

Like you said, sometimes this feeling—this isn’t wine, but I went to see the Queen’s diamonds in Buckingham Palace years ago, and I never—I’ve got a little diamond on my ring, but I never understood why people did what they did for diamonds, never understood it. And then I went to Buckingham Palace and I stood in front of one of her collections of diamonds and I was like, “Oh my goodness, I want that. I would do anything to have that diamond.” And I just felt that need. I want that.

And I tried to put that in the book, the sort of addiction. I know it’s a very difficult topic in the wine world, but what will we do for that one more taste?

Natalie: Absolutely. Absolutely. People chase all their lives after certain tastes, and it’s why they get suckered into buying fake bottles for hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’ll do anything because they actually just want that, especially the first taste—to recall your first evocative taste. Yeah, absolutely.

Jo: Yeah. I think it’s very strong. And I also didn’t really understand the collectors. Drops of God is very good on why people collect wine and why they appreciate that. But it’s also, again, we came back to earlier, why do you drink wine with a friend or whatever? And perhaps it’s the experience that we are looking for rather than that taste. It might be taste, again, for people like yourself who are super tasters, but for me it’s, I want that experience again. And of course you never can capture it again.

Natalie: That’s what makes us fools till the end. We keep chasing after it.

Jo: Oh, it’s just one more glass, one more taste away.

Natalie: I’m still enjoying this wine, by the way.

Jo: Excellent, excellent. I can’t even tell the level on that goblet. Very discreet.

Poisonous Plants in the Vineyard

Natalie: You also mentioned several poisonous plants at the Standing Stone Cellars property, including hemlock, henbane, monkshood, and nightshade. And one character says that the land needs them to feed the soils and grow the vines, and that the monkshood alkaloids seep deep into the soil, creating the slight bitterness that adds to the complexity. Nightshade contributes a deep, almost smoky note to the red. I love that idea. Did you make that up, or is that based on viticultural science?

Jo: The fact that you have to ask me is awesome because you know all this stuff. As far as I know, I made it up because I needed some poisonous plants for another particular occasion in the book.

And so I thought, but I think—as I said about the wildflowers at Limeburn Hill and the yarrow, the patches of yarrow and all the things they had growing to be part of it—why wouldn’t you do that in some way? And those herbs like hemlock and henbane, they’re used in small amounts. Poisons are used in small amounts to bring people, again, to a different level of consciousness. I guess you could say that about alcohol as well. In smaller doses it’s effective, and in larger doses it can be difficult. But that’s where I got the idea from. If you’re going to plant yarrow, why wouldn’t you plant henbane or nightshade?

So I don’t know. Have you heard of people using the darker plants?

Natalie: I have not. The most popular one is over in Australia. They have eucalyptus plants, which have a very strong oil, and you can taste the eucalyptus, the minty green, kind of in a pleasant way in some of their Cabernets or Shiraz. But I haven’t heard of the poisonous plants. So that would definitely take a darker turn of mind, I think.

Jo: I loved it. But I think the idea of the flowers and things growing is that some of the whatever’s in the nutrients go into the soil, right? And then the vines pick things up from the soil. So it wouldn’t necessarily be the poison in the wine, but I can’t see why that wouldn’t be a technically possible thing. So maybe there’s a listener who would love to tell us.

Natalie: Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s why they have the cover crops and all that. You want to encourage—the more diversity of plants you have, the more rich and diverse your soil will be microbially, and the more different insects and species. There’s a winery in Quebec that has like a hundred thousand different plants and insects and bees because they planted so much as an experiment, and they have this sort of wild nature all around it. It all definitely contributes for sure.

Architecture and Vineyard Design

Jo: Yeah. Actually Rebecca, the character in the book, I have her as an architect, and one of the reasons was because I wanted to redesign the vineyard to bring in more of this stuff. So we see these vertical walls, vertical plantings, and I thought that would be awesome on the side of a winery where you could, in the tasting room or something, there’d be actually crops up the side and change the water courses. And so I was really interested in how the plans for the vineyard would work. And of course in the book I have a labyrinth planting, which I think is very unlikely, but I thought that was quite cool.

Natalie: Yeah, no, there is a winery that has a labyrinth. But also I’m just working on a piece right now on wine and architecture, and the Antinori Winery in Tuscany, Italy has something like—it’s 11 hectares, I get acres and hectares mixed up—but the vines are growing on the roof and sides, the Sangiovese, so it looks like it’s wrapped in this green cloak and the winery’s rising up out of the land itself. So it’s really cool.

Jo: That is wonderful. I love architecture. I’ve got architects in so many of my books. I think in another life I would’ve been an architect.

Natalie: Yes, you have so many passions. That’s what makes you a great writer. You pursue them.

And I was impressed with just how much you dove into the winemaking and even in our exchanges leading up to this, beyond the book itself. So that’s what keeps you going.

The Most Difficult Part of Writing

Natalie: What was the most difficult part of writing this book?

Jo: I did love the research, but it got really difficult. And in fact, the biggest change I had to make was the description of the grapes at the different times of year. I had to even change when the book started. I had it originally starting in February, and my beta reader said, “You can’t have frost candles before bud break. That doesn’t make sense.” So I had to change that.

But it was really interesting and difficult to try and do all of that research and get it right. But also with biodynamics, I was having to try and work out, what kind of moon do you need on what kind of fruit day? And what day of the month would this be? And then what would the grapes look like? And then what?

So there was a whole year I had to map out—the viticulture year, the pagan year, the biodynamic year. There was a lot of trying to get things right. And again, I have to apologize in advance. I’m bound to have got something wrong, but I really did try.

Natalie: That’s okay. That’s hard. Between that and the whole architecture thing, you’re ready to open your own winery.

Jo: Oh, when I’m rich, I’ll just open one.

Natalie: Oh, that’s right. Sit back on your beautiful veranda in your white flowy dress and your Chardonnay.

Jo: Absolutely!

Final Questions

Natalie: Alright. Wow, time just flew here, Jo. Let me round up with a few last questions. If you could share a bottle of wine with any person in the world, who would that be and which bottle would you open with them?

A Meeting with Carl Jung

Jo: I am very much inspired by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. So I studied psychology of religion, and his work has inspired my fiction. So Stone of Fire and Crypt of Bone have a lot of Jung in them. But also my nonfiction book, Writing the Shadow, which is about tapping into the shadow, the dark side. And there’s a heck of a lot of shadow in the wine industry. You and I will have to—

Natalie: Oh yes, we’ll get into it. Yep.

Jo: We’ll talk about that. But yes, so Carl Jung—obviously now dead—but he wrote about wine as a metaphor for transformation of base into gold. That was one of his many things.

Natalie: I did know that.

Jo: The repressed self. Okay. Yeah, the repressed self. A lot about mythology, a lot about folklore. But I was like, what do you drink with Carl Jung? So I actually had a look. Where I would want to do it is he has a tower. He did a lot of stone carving, again architecture, at his tower in Bollingen on Lake Zurich. So I looked for some wine in that region, and there’s a wine called Chasselas. Maybe, you know, is that right?

Natalie: I wouldn’t dare correct your pronunciation after all we’ve been through, even for wine terms. Yes, Chasselas. But it is the Swiss grape. I think it’s a bright white.

Jo: Yes. So it’s a white wine. And I would put that with a cheese platter, maybe raclette, which is the melted cheese that you have in that region. And I would ask him, because I’m turning 50 next year and I feel like I would like to ask him about the challenges of midlife. He had a bit of a breakdown and he wrote this thing called The Red Book, and I’ve got a copy. It’s this huge oversized book. And he did paintings and he just wrote journals and he was just deep in midlife crisis.

And so I love that. I think it’s really interesting. We think of him in academia, but he was just very—I want to use the word sensual, and I don’t mean sexual—he was just deeply in life. So yeah, Carl Jung. There you go. Could have a session while you’re at it.

Natalie: That sounds great. I love that.

And as we wrap up, is there anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like to mention?

Encouraging Wine Exploration

Jo: I think I would encourage people—I’ve listened to a few of your episodes and people are so good at describing wine. And as someone who is just a normal wine person, I think I’d really encourage people to try different kinds of wine without being scared of it. And I feel like sometimes when normal people like me listen to wonderful writers like yourself about wines, we feel maybe a bit stupid in a way. “Oh, I can’t try that,” or “I can’t taste that.”

But what I’ve discovered, I think, by visiting these smaller vineyards is just try some stuff that’s a bit out of your comfort zone. And it might be super, super interesting, like the orange wine. I’d never tried these sort of volcanic orange wines. And even if you can’t describe them very well, it doesn’t matter.

I think supporting the vineyards, supporting the viticulture industry is just as important as supporting the authors and the artists and the writers out there. And it’s a difficult time for everyone, and hopefully we can all support each other. But yeah, I absolutely loved writing this book. I love delving into the wine industry, and I appreciate all of you a lot more.

Natalie: Great. And my advice would be parallel to yours: Try something outside your reading genre, like folk horror. I was pleasantly surprised. It was like the funky Chardonnay I had never tried before. It was great. I loved it. It expanded my horizons.

Where can people best get in touch with you, Jo?

Jo: Yes, so jfpenn.com/bloodvintage is the book. Since you’re listening to a podcast, if you want to write, The Creative Penn podcast—Penn with a double N. And Instagram at jfpennauthor. You can find lots of photos that also go with the book, including those vineyards, which I hope people will check out.

Natalie: That sounds like a lot of fun. Great, Jo, this has been fantastic. I loved it. I can’t believe how fast the time went, but thank you. Next time it has to be over a glass of wine in person. Maybe in the part of the vineyard where we’re not allowed to go because it just rebels that way.

Jo: Thanks so much for having me, Natalie. That was great.

Natalie: All right. I raised my glass to you. Cheers!

Jo: Cheers!

The post Blood, Wine, And Sacrifice: Folk Horror Inspired By England’s Biodynamic Vineyards With J.F. Penn And Natalie MacLean appeared first on Books And Travel.

In this fascinating conversation, Luisa Navarro, founder of Mexico in My Pocket and author of Mexico’s Day of the Dead: A Celebration of Life through Stories and Photos, shares her personal journey from rejecting her Mexican heritage to celebrating it, while revealing the true beauty and meaning behind one of Mexico’s most misunderstood traditions.

Luisa Navarro is the founder and CEO of Mexico in My Pocket, and the author of Mexico’s Day of the Dead: A Celebration of Life through Stories and Photos.

• Luisa’s childhood struggle with being Mexican American and how she transformed from rejecting her culture to becoming its passionate advocate
• The true meaning behind Día de los Muertos, its indigenous Aztec origins, and how it differs completely from Halloween
• The significance of ofrendas (altars), including sugar skulls, pan de muerto, marigolds, and photographs of deceased loved ones
• How different days honor different types of deaths
• Traditional foods like pan de muerto, café de olla, and how families share meals with both the living and the dead
• How to respectfully experience Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico while avoiding appropriation and understanding the difference between authentic traditions and commercialized parades

You can find Luisa at MexicoInMyPocket.com and Mexico’s Day of the Dead book here.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello, travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Luisa Navarro. Hi Luisa.

Luisa: Hi. It’s so wonderful to be here with you today.

Jo: Great to meet you. Now, just a quick introduction. Luisa is the founder and CEO of Mexico in My Pocket, and the author of Mexico’s Day of the Dead: A Celebration of Life through Stories and Photos, which is fantastic.

So first up, just tell us a bit more about you and your Mexican heritage and how you bring that into your life and your business in Brooklyn.

Luisa: Yes, of course. So I was actually born in Dallas, Texas. I am Mexican American. My mom is from Tila, which is Northern Mexico, and my dad is from Michoacán, which is more central and it’s actually where Día de los Muertos is very much celebrated.

Growing up in Dallas, I struggled originally with my identity a lot being Mexican American —

because what happened was I went to school and I only spoke Spanish because Spanish was my first language. My mom insisted that all four of her kids learn Spanish first before going to school. And then when we were in school, we all struggled to make friends because we only spoke Spanish.

The teachers would criticize my mom, but my mom insisted that we would be perfectly fine and that we would learn English eventually, and she was right. And so eventually I became bilingual. And during that time, at a very young age, I discovered young kids were saying horrible things about Mexicans and I didn’t know how to handle that. I realized, wait, I think I’m Mexican.

And so long story short, I didn’t want to be Mexican at a very young age. I was about four or five years old. I have these memories very vividly. And so I came home to my mom in Dallas and I said, I’m no longer Luisa, I’m now Hannah. I think I said Hana, my mom always says I pronounced it very interestingly, but I was like, I’m Hana. And I will not respond if you don’t call me Hana. Yeah, I mean, it’s very sad.

But luckily, luckily, luckily, thank God my mom and my grandmothers all came to my rescue and they were like, no, these kids are wrong, and here’s why, and here’s why being Mexican is incredible. And so luckily for me, I did a 180. I very much embraced my culture. I became a journalist.

And during that journey as a journalist, I noticed that these negative types of stories continued to happen. But instead of getting upset with people, I never really blamed the kids who said these things because I realized they were being taught this by their parents. As you get older, you realize this is being learned.

And so when I became a journalist, I realized that the media was always covering us in a very negative light. And being American is amazing because we have mainstream media here. We have the power to tell stories, but unfortunately I have seen as a Mexican American, a lot of those stories that are told about Mexico in the US are negative.

I wanted to do something positive. So as a journalist, I started a side project called Mexico in My Pocket and it was a blog. And on that blog I would share very positive stories about Mexico and our culture, and —

I slowly started to learn more about my heritage and I became very passionate about it.

And I started that blog in 2015. So it’s been 10 years now.

So basically my journalism career brought me to New York City. I went to Columbia Journalism School and then eventually I got out of the news and I started my own company called Mexico in My Pocket, where we sell beautiful handcrafted items from all over Mexico. And I have the privilege of telling the story of how these products are made, and the stories of our culture.

Jo: I think that’s wonderful. It’s really interesting to hear about how that felt for you as a child. But of course, you’ve chosen one really interesting topic, Day of the Dead, which in itself many people struggle with negative stereotypes around Day of the Dead. So let’s just start with sort of basics.

What is Day of the Dead? When is it? And why did you choose this topic?

Because you could have chosen lots of different ones.

Luisa: I could have chosen so many different topics. And the irony is that when I was little, I also very much struggled with the fear of death. And I actually don’t think I really loved Day of the Dead as a child because my mom would decorate with skeletons during that time of year. And I feared it and I was like, this is terrifying. I don’t want to talk about death. My biggest fear was my parents dying.

But the reason that I decided to write a book about Day of the Dead, and for those of you who don’t know what Day of the Dead is, is once a year. It’s a Mexican tradition, it’s rooted in Mexico.

Once a year we come together and we honor our loved ones who have died.

And I think it’s the most incredible holiday. I think that everyone around the world should take time to once a year, honor their loved ones who have died.

You know, we celebrate our moms once a year. We celebrate our dads once a year. We celebrate love. Once a year, we should be celebrating our loved ones who have died. And I think that Mexico is the true emblem and symbol and example for us to honor the dead once a year. And they’ve set an incredible example for us not to fear death, but to take control of it the most that we can and to celebrate our loved ones who have died and not forget them.

And so the reason I wrote this book, there’s a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons was just like the reason I started my blog. I felt like —

I did not see an accurate or beautiful representation of what Day of the Dead is, and I felt like I wanted something to preserve these traditions so that I could pass it down to the future generations, including my son.

Because I worried that being Mexican American, I am the first generation to live here, but I’m so proud to be Mexican and I never want to lose sight of that. And I want my son to also know about his heritage, his ancestry, his traditions. And so I wrote this book for the future generations so that they could learn and always celebrate these traditions, no matter how far removed they are from their origin, from their ancestry’s origin country.

Another reason I wrote the book was —

There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to Day of the Dead.

So I have a gift shop in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, and people would come into our store and they would see the altar that I build in the store. And they would ask us if we were celebrating the devil. And I was like, okay. We need a book because I want to clarify just how beautiful Day of the Dead is.

And I think the name Day of the Dead, I think anything associated with death can be very off-putting because I think just like me as a child fearing death. I think a lot of people fear death and I think they don’t want to talk about it. And so that inspired me to write this book and to shed light on how I think Mexico is doing an incredible job at basically honoring our loved ones who have died.

And if you’ve experienced death, I think you can relate to this, that it is very painful, not just because the person died, but you feel like you’re not allowed to talk about them anymore. And Day of the Dead is a time where you can come together once a year and talk about your loved ones who have died without having to worry about anyone judging you. And I think it’s so beautiful.

Jo: You mentioned your son there and I noticed in the book, which is a beautiful book, both the words and obviously the images, it is really beautiful and colorful. And there are children in the book, and this is another thing that I think some people get hung up on, like we should only talk about death if we’re adults or whatever. But Mexican tradition seems to bring in the children a lot more. Perhaps you could comment on that, like how is it so natural that everyone in the family is included?

Luisa: I mean, everyone in the family is included because on Day of the Dead, we’re honoring our family members. And so it’s also a wonderful opportunity to educate your children on their ancestors and on their loved ones who have died.

And quite frankly, one of the things that was most moving to me when I traveled to Oaxaca that I didn’t know about was an altar that honored babies. And so there’s room for everyone, like death affects everyone. It affects all ages. It affects different scenarios as we know.

You know, I saw an altar where a woman was 35 years old. I’m 35 now. And she lost her baby and she died as well in giving birth. And so they honored her and her child on this altar, and I think that’s so beautiful because her story was not forgotten in spite of such a tragic situation. And I think that Mexico does a really beautiful job of that.

Jo: So let’s come to the altar that you mentioned.

What goes on the altar? What types of things might people put on the altar and what is the aim of it?

Luisa: Yeah, so that’s actually another reason I wrote the book. So the altar has so many elements. I don’t even think we have time to get into every single one because quite frankly, I wrote a whole chapter on it and I even had questions about how to build a traditional altar because there’s so much tradition and history that is involved in it.

We place the sugar skulls with people’s names to honor the sweetness of life, but also to honor and remember the specific person who died. We use pan de muerto, which is a specific type of Day of the Dead bread that only happens, that is only made once a year and it is made with anise and orange peels and orange blossom water. It also honors the sweetness of life, but then they decorate it with crossbones on top to honor the dead.

So what I would say is that from all of these elements, it’s really coming together and honoring and celebrating and really showing that Mexicans don’t fear death, but they respect it and they choose to accept it. I think they choose to accept it.

But one of the most important things that goes on an altar are the photographs of our loved ones, of our ancestors.

And so that’s why I believe we include everyone. We include our children, and we show them and we teach them, and we tell them about their great grandparents and we tell them about their grandparents. It’s a wonderful time of year to finally share your family stories, and so that’s why I think everyone around the world should be celebrating Day of the Dead. Or doing it in their own way. Once a year, having a dinner at home and talking about their loved ones who have died. I don’t think we should not talk about this. And that’s why I love being Mexican. I’m Mexican, and I’m American, but being Mexican is incredible because of Día de los Muertos.

Jo: I have some follow up questions there. So the first thing is the skull. You mentioned the sugar skulls. I wanted to show you and the people on the video. So this is the one I keep here with the butterflies, but they obviously, it’s not to be put on an altar, but it’s kind of, I like to keep it there and I bought it in the US.

Luisa: You can put that on an altar actually. Yeah. You can put that on an altar. It’s beautiful. It’s hand painted. It’s clay. Yeah. That’s stunning. I love that.

Jo: Yeah, so I kind of have it in my own way, not as part of your tradition, but as part of my own sort of eclectic tradition. But so tell us more about the skulls and the skeletons. Because you mentioned, and the point is that they are, the sugar skulls are more colorful, aren’t they? Because people think black and white and kind of that depressing thing.

Tell us about the colorful sugar skulls

Luisa: Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned that. So I talk about this in the book. I talk about the colors of Day of the Dead actually. And that’s exactly why we chose the turquoise and the orange color. The orange, obviously is representative of the marigolds, which we use marigolds because of the scent and the color, because we believe that the scent and the color attracts the spirits to visit us once a year. So we place them on the altar and we sprinkle petals of them to lead the dead back to us, the spirits back to us to visit us once a year.

But you mentioned the skulls and the skulls. What people might not realize is that it’s thanks to indigenous traditions and thanks to the indigenous people that Day of the Dead exists in Mexico. So the origins of Day of the Dead stem from the God of Death known as Mictlantecuhtli. And yes, that is a mouthful, but it’s important that we know his name, that we celebrate him, and that we honor the roots of this indigenous tradition.

It was only blended until the Spanish arrived, thanks to Catholicism. But, I want to highlight him specifically because he was the god of death and he was depicted with a skeletal face. And so you were interested in why skeletons and I actually in my own research was very interested in why on earth Mexicans are obsessed with skeletons. It’s all thanks to him.

So the Aztecs, once a year in the summer actually would celebrate him in his festival. And they would make tamales and they would burn copal. And some of these traditions we can see in modern day Día de los Muertos celebrations. These traditions didn’t evolve until the Spanish arrived, and they imposed Catholic religion on the indigenous people and eventually, there was a syncretism that happened, a natural syncretism.

And the tradition moved from the summer because the Aztecs refused to get rid of their honoring of the god of death. And they would secretly kind of continue. And eventually it was moved to All Souls Day and All Saints Day. And so that’s the modern day celebration that we know today, and that’s why altars have crosses and Virgen de Guadalupe. And there’s a blending of indigenous traditions with Catholicism. So yeah, that’s why we have the skeleton. It’s thanks to that god and it’s thanks to the Aztecs and the indigenous traditions.

Jo: Yeah. And I think, I mean obviously in many traditions there’s portrayals of death, but it’s never so colorful.

And I think that’s what’s so lovely about the skeletons and the face painting and the beautiful pictures you have in the book. But also just to come back on the Day of the Dead, I was really interested. I didn’t know. And in your book you list, it’s not just one day.

There’s actually different days for different types of people who died.

Luisa: Yeah, that’s correct. So, traditionally it starts on the evening of October 31st. It’s not Halloween, it has nothing to do with Halloween. And then it’s November 1st when the kids arrive, and then November 2nd when the adults arrive. But the thing is that people don’t realize is that all over Mexico, there are different traditions. So in some parts they believe that it depends on where you are in Mexico and how they celebrate. But that’s like pretty much the basics, right?

But yes, there are other days, I do have it in the book actually. So October 27th is the day to remember pets. October 28th is for the tragic deaths, including those who died from violence or suicide. And then October 29th is for the drowning. And the one I really like is October 30th, because it’s a day for those who have been forgotten or who don’t have a family member to remember them.

But yes, there are different days to honor different people. People really like the day to remember their pets, which is October 27th. Which I love too. And like that’s the thing is like, I just feel like I’m just so proud to be Mexican and I’m so proud of these traditions and I really just want to shed light on them and shed light on the beauty of them and quell some of that misunderstanding that we’re celebrating the devil because that has nothing to do with that at all.

In fact, I think more people, if they learned about Day of the Dead, they’d be inspired to host a dinner themselves and to maybe talk about their loved ones who have died and put their pictures up and maybe make their favorite meals. In my opinion, it is the most beautiful holiday in the entire world. So I’m very, very proud of it.

Jo: Again, coming back to the altar, so you mentioned the pan de muerto. So do you eat that?

Do people actually eat pan de muerto or is that an offering food?

Luisa: We do eat it. So there’s two things there. So one, you’re right when we put it on the altar. Actually this is a great question. So there’s two schools of thought here. You can buy it in the bakery. So think of it like a sweet treat that’s once a year, kind of like, I’m sure you know this, but in the United States once a year, pumpkin spice is huge, right? So it’s like everyone wants their pumpkin spice. The difference is, is that this is rooted in tradition.

So once a year in Mexico, the bakeries make and you can go and buy it, and it’s the most delicious thing in the world. And the one thing that most people don’t realize is there’s actually tons of different types of pan de muerto, and in my book, I do cover the different types because we visited different villages and how they make it.

And there’s a beautiful pan de muerto that almost looks like embroidery. And it’s actually all made of flour. They’re like these flour, they’re actual flowers like floral. It looks like embroidery. And that type of bread is from Oaxaca. But it’s a sweet treat that you can eat once a year and we do put it on the altar.

When I put it on my altar, I do not eat it after. But it, if you put it on the altar, it is meant for the dead. And so what a lot of people say, depending on where you travel in Mexico, but they say they put it on the altar and then after the dead have already had their chance, like let’s say they come November 1st or November 2nd and they’ve gotten their chance to eat the bread, then they will eat it and enjoy it.

But what some people say who have eaten it and enjoyed it is they say that it’s lost its taste. Because the dead already had it. So I personally do not eat the bread if I put it on the altar. But some people do, some people do eat the bread after and enjoy it with their family during the celebrations, but it’s not until after the dead have arrived. So yeah.

Jo: They’ve got to have their bit first.

Luisa: Yeah. It’s all fascinating, right? And it’s like, I love, that’s the thing is it’s nuanced. It’s very nuanced.

Jo: Yeah, and everyone has their own thing, but you’ve got some other recipes in the book I think as well.

What are the other food and drinks that are associated with that time?

Luisa: Yeah, we do. I’m very, very happy because we asked people to collaborate because something my dad has always emphasized is that I’m very privileged as a Mexican American to be able to travel between Mexico and the United States, and I can’t agree more. And so, recognizing that there will be people who will never have the chance or the opportunity to travel to Mexico to celebrate these holidays, I wanted to make sure that we included recipes in the book so that people could celebrate no matter where they live.

So we have a recipe for sugar skulls in the book. We have a recipe, well, it’s a tutorial, a DIY tutorial to make papel picado, which are these gorgeous Mexican tissue paper flags, tissue paper garlands that we use to celebrate and honor the fragility of death. And they’re really gorgeous. I’m sure you’ve seen them. If you go to a Mexican restaurant, you’ve seen them. But we also use them during Day of the Dead to honor our loved ones. And they all have little motifs. So you’ll often, for Day of the Dead, you’ll see them decorated with skulls and skeletons.

And then we have something called pan de muerto negro, and this is a specific type of pan de muerto, but it’s black sugar made from burnt corn husks, so corn husks, which we use to wrap our tamales in. And this recipe is beautiful because it represents the ashes of the dead.

I found that it doesn’t taste that different from the traditional sugar one. I thought it would taste different for me. It didn’t taste different. But it is really fun and it is really beautiful. So it’s got a black color with the crossbones and traditional. But yeah, we had Fany Gerson who I absolutely adore. She is the owner of La Newyorkina here in New York City and she provided that recipe for us.

Jo: That’s great. And then what about drinking? Is there any alcohol involved or is it a non-drinking event or is there special drinks that people have?

Luisa: So the rule of thumb there, or when alcohol is involved, like it would be, let’s say my great-grandfather loved a specific type of beer, right? So I would put that on the altar for him so that when he arrives he can have that specific alcohol that he loved in life. But yes, you can, for example, if you’re having a dinner. Of course you can have a drink, you can have, I mean, Mexico is the land of tequila, mezcal, and we also have other delicious drinks like café de olla, which is a cinnamon type coffee that is made in a pot. That’s why it’s called café de olla. It’s so delicious.

So yeah, basically you would drink the beverages that your loved ones really enjoyed. It could even be a Mexican Coca-Cola. I mean, I love Coca-Cola. I love specifically Mexican Coca-Cola. It’s made with a different type of sugar. And yeah, so those would be the beverages.

Jo: And then I wanted to circle back to the religion element. Because the majority of Mexican people are at least nominally Catholic. And so when people come to the altar, are there prayers, Catholic prayers that you would say for the dead, or is the Catholicism kind of completely different?

Do you pray at the altar or is it more of a memorial?

Luisa: I would say it’s more of a memorial.

That isn’t to say that you can’t pray at the altar. You can obviously pray, but yeah, it is a blending of Catholic and indigenous traditions because Mexico was colonized by the Spanish. They brought Catholicism and so you will find crosses. In fact, the top of the altar, traditionally if it’s a seven tier altar, should have a saint at the top.

So I typically put La Virgen de Guadalupe, which every Mexican person will know. She is basically the patron saint of all of Mexico. She’s the Virgin Mary of Mexico. And my grandmother revered her, so I always put La Virgen de Guadalupe at the top of my altar. So yeah, you will definitely see a blending of Catholicism with these traditions for sure.

Jo: And if you go to church over that period, do they have a special service?

Luisa: Yes, of course, because since it’s celebrated on All Saints Day and All Souls Day, so if you went to All Saints Day and All Souls Day, you would, yes, you would go to church for that. I haven’t seen Day of the Dead altars in the Catholic Church. But you will see them outside, like all over Mexico.

Jo: So you’ve mentioned a couple of places, you mentioned Oaxaca and some other places. But if people want to visit, so I mean, I’m really interested as a tourist. Are there places that tourists can go to? You know, not in a weird way, but people who are interested in the cultural elements, who want to come and have a look.

Are there places where tourists can visit for Day of the Dead?

Luisa: Yeah, a hundred percent. There’s definitely ways to do it. One of the things there, there’s lots of ways to do it. I would say one of the best ways is to go to Mexico City, because it is a large city and there’s celebrations all over.

If you wanted to go to the cemeteries, I would recommend making a personal connection with someone before you go. Not just like visiting without having some type of connection or some type of invitation.

Whenever I go, it’s because I’ve made some type of connection and have been invited. And to be honest, like I went because I was documenting it for the book, but I don’t necessarily just go to go like I wanted to learn more.

I will say be mindful if you visit the cemeteries that you are a tourist, sadly, some people will take advantage and get drunk and act inappropriate. One of the things that I learned is that the face paint that it, they’re dressed as La Catrina, and that’s a whole other topic, but it’s the sugar skull face paint that you see. It’s not appropriate to go to the cemeteries with that. So it’s something to be mindful of as a tourist that those are separate traditions.

So if you’re going to the cemetery to be very mindful that you’re in a cemetery, you will see music. It depends on the cemetery. That’s the other thing. And it depends on the location. So for example, in Michoacán, when I visited Michoacán, I found that it was a lot more quiet. It wasn’t somber, but the families were gathered and they might have been drinking a beer, but they were gathered more as like, I wouldn’t say it was this rambunctious party.

Now there’s other cemeteries where I have heard and I chose not to go. But I have heard that there are concerts happening, like full blown concerts. So yeah, I mean, it does depend, but at the end of the day, I think you need to be mindful that you are a tourist and to do your research and talk to people before you decide to go. Just like if you go into someone’s home, right? You’re going to be respectful.

If you go into someone’s home, like if someone asks you to take your shoes off when you go into someone’s home, you respect that and you honor that, and you’re visiting, right? So it’s the same when you go for Day of the Dead, is just have these conversations, be mindful, ask what’s appropriate, and trust your gut. You know, I think you’ll know too if you’re like something feels like you’re being, you know, you’re trespassing or that type of thing.

Jo: Yeah. And are there processions and you know more, you see that in the movies and stuff? Does that happen too?

Luisa: It does. And I have to say that so originally the only, it has become very commercialized, I have to say.

The only reason the parade happens in Mexico City now is because of the James Bond movie. That’s not like a centuries old tradition.

So people think that that’s like some centuries old tradition. That’s not true.

It’s actually Day of the Dead has become extremely popular because of movies like Coco as we know. And so now there are parades, but you know what, like those are for the tourists and I think it’s great. If you want to go and celebrate and see, a lot of Mexican artisans participate in those parades, which makes me really happy.

So you get to see like their actual craft and artwork, and I think it’s a wonderful way to go and celebrate if you’d like, and do the face paint. Like in that scenario, the face paint is totally fine, just know what you’re wearing. And I talk about that in the book, but there’s a whole section on who La Catrina is. And why that originated. But that is what the face paint is. I think the problem with the face paint is that people don’t know what they’re wearing, so they don’t know the history of her.

Jo: And I wonder if those processions and like the Bond movie is part of, you know, you’ve started by saying, somebody said, are you celebrating the devil? And I wonder if there’s a confusion with the Carnival / Mardi Gras / voodoo, sort of the skeleton from Voodoo who comes out the ground, and then there’s processions and things. Do you think that may have got mixed up in people’s heads?

Luisa: I think yeah, of course. I think there is a confusion between Halloween and Day of the Dead, but —

Day of the Dead is not Halloween at all and it’s not voodoo at all.

And I think that because of the skeleton imagery that it can get mixed up and confused if people don’t read about the origins.

And that’s one thing I will say, people ask me all the time if they can celebrate Day of the Dead, and I mean, death is universal. It affects all of us. Of course, you can celebrate Day of the Dead, but it’s just like know exactly what you are celebrating and know about the history and research and read about Mictlantecuhtli and the God of death and the Aztec traditions, and how that skeleton imagery evolved into our modern day traditions. So it’s about educating yourself at the end of the day.

And look, I’m Mexican American, but I also had to educate myself on these traditions and learn about them.

Jo: So this is the Books and Travel podcast, so do you have any other books that you would recommend about Day of the Dead or Mexico in general?

Luisa: Of course. So my favorite book that I read throughout this process, I read lots of books and articles and information, but my specific favorite one was called The Skeleton at the Feast. And I feel like they really got into the history of Day of the Dead. And so I recommend that book if you want to check it out and learn more about the history of Day of the Dead.

Jo: Brilliant. And just show us your book one more time on the video because it’s so beautiful. It’s just fantastic. So where can people find the book and everything you do online?

Luisa: Yeah, of course. So the book is available wherever all books are sold. So you can find it at Amazon, you can find it at Barnes and Noble Target, bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores, people from my community love shopping there. And you can find me at mexicoinmypocket.com at Mexico in My Pocket, all over social media.

Jo: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Luisa. That was great.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversation between Jo Penn and Luisa Navarro about Mexico’s Day of the Dead traditions.

The post Mexico’s Day Of The Dead With Luisa Navarro appeared first on Books And Travel.

Canadian ex-archaeologist and award-winning author Sean McLachlan shares insights from 25 years of full-time writing and decades of travel through Egypt, Morocco, and the Middle East.

Sean McLachlan is a Canadian ex-archaeologist and the multi-award-winning author of history, travel, and fiction. His books include The Masked Man of Cairo Historical Detective series, the Moroccan Mysteries, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Toxic World.

• Sean’s previous archaeology career in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including dangerous moments
• The reality of archaeological fieldwork vs. Hollywood portrayals, from Roman bath games to 3000-year-old fingerprints
• His Masked Man of Cairo detective series set in 1919 Egypt during the independence movement
• Hidden gems in Egypt beyond ancient sites: Islamic Cairo, desert oases, Coptic monasteries, and the new museums
• Practical travel advice for Egypt and the Middle East, including cultural sensitivity and safety tips
• His post-apocalyptic fiction and thoughts on what will survive from our civilization for future archaeologists

You can find Sean at SeanMcLachlan.net and his books here on Amazon.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Joanna Penn, and today I’m here with Sean McLachlan. Hi Sean.

Sean: Hey, Joanna.

Jo: It’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Sean is a Canadian ex-archaeologist and the multi-award-winning author of history, travel, and fiction. His books include The Masked Man of Cairo Historical Detective series, the Moroccan Mysteries, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Toxic World.

Wow, lots there. Sean, you were just telling me how long you’ve been a full-time author?

Sean: It’s my 25th anniversary this year as a matter of fact.

Jo: That is just incredible. But before we get into that, tell us about your previous career in archaeology, because obviously I’m fascinated with it. Lots of people are.

What is the reality of the archaeologist’s job? Are you really like Indiana Jones?!

Sean: Well, not quite Indiana Jones. I worked for about 10 years in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, got a master’s degree. And it’s an amazing job actually. There’s a lot of meticulous excavation and fieldwork, surveying, a lot of lab work, and it is a lot of fun.

I ended up shifting out of it because I didn’t like the academic side of it too much – the fighting for office space and funding and the petty backstabbing that you see in so many university departments. I really liked the fun stuff, which was the actual fieldwork.

And as far as being Indiana Jones, well I never got shot at when I was in the field. I did get shot at by accident once when I was hiking in Arizona, but that’s a different story. And the only real danger was once there was a Palestinian Viper on the site when we were working in Tel Gezer in Israel, Which is this really nasty snake that the venom can kill you in 20 minutes. But we were working near a kibbutz and one of the kibbutz members had a tractor and ran it over. So that was the end of that problem.

Jo: But just sort of coming back on, you said you didn’t like the academic side but you did enjoy the dig work and the lab work. So in my head, I know what dig work looks like from the movies, obviously. What did you do in the labs and —

What time period were you working on?

Sean: Well, I worked in several different time periods. The biggest site I worked at was Tel Gezer, which was an old archaeological site in Israel. And a tell is basically an artificial mound where people will build a settlement usually on high ground. And then people will build on those foundations and people will build. And after several thousand years, you end up with an artificial hill, which is all just archaeological deposits and you get this a lot throughout the Middle East and they’re called Tell, which is Arabic for Hill.

And we were digging through that. And the main thing we were doing in those field seasons was we were working through an Egyptian governor’s palace when the Egyptians conquered the Levant. And so we found some nice hieroglyphics and all that. And also the city gate, which was commissioned by King Solomon. It’s actually mentioned in the Old Testament.

So we’re working on that. And that was actually the second time I got in danger in archaeology, both at the same site because we had these things to either side of the gate called casemate walls, where you had an inner wall and an outer wall, and then a storage room in the center.

And so we were digging down through the deposits to find all the stuff that was inside and somebody was working on the other side of the wall, and I’m about eight feet down. And this guy had found a big rock and he thought it was just a deposit. It was too big to move, so he was slamming at it with a sledgehammer, but what he didn’t realize, it was part of the wall.

So I’m eight feet down with this not very stable wall above me of these giant stones, and suddenly it starts going boom, boom.

Jo: Buried alive!

Sean: Fastest I ever moved! I teleported out of that pit. I was just, one moment I’m in there and the other moment I’m about 10 feet away screaming my head off.

Jo: And one of the tells I’ve been to is Megiddo, which is the biblical Armageddon.

Sean: Megiddo is amazing.

Jo: What got me into writing the types of things that we both write is The Source by James Michener, which of course is based on that.

Sean: Well, I never worked at Megiddo. Michener’s book was amazing though. I read that in university and it was well worth reading. I actually read it in Bulgaria when I was on another excavation, and this was an interesting site because —

One of the exciting things about archaeology is you never know what you’re going to find —

and this site was on really high hill at this sharp turn of the Struma River, which runs through Bulgaria, down to Thessaloniki on the Greek coast.

We’d seen some Roman deposits come out of there. So we thought we were going to get a Roman village or a villa on top of this high ground. So we start digging down and the first thing we come to is ash. And we keep digging. We get more and more ash and we’re getting all like black hands and everything is poofing up everywhere and we’re sneezing black. It’s terrible.

And we went through about eight feet of this stuff and we asked around, and we found out that that had been a beacon from the Balkan Wars from 1912, because they were worried the Turks were going to come up the river valley and attack. And so this was to signal. So we got through that and then we found the Roman site.

But it wasn’t a villa, it was several graves. So we excavated those and we looked down further to see if we’d find more graves. And in the end, actually, we found a very well preserved Bronze Age village. So we went through a good 3000 years of habitation from 1912 all the way back to 1500 BC.

Jo: Wow.

Sean: So that was a lot of fun.

Jo: That is the romance of archaeology, right? That everybody thinks about. And then of course we both put that kind of stuff in our books now. But let’s talk about that because I wondered if you see things differently. I think when I went to Megiddo, I was kind of seeing the layers of story.

You travel a lot and you also research these different areas of history.

How do you look below the surface of what is there to find those stories underneath?

Sean: Well, one of the interesting things about archaeological sites is thinking about the people that were there.

I was at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, these giant Roman baths, just a few weeks ago. And my favorite part, you’re going through these giant vaulted rooms. They’re still preserved 2000 years later, tile floors. Interesting little drains that are still there, like the drains are still there, so well preserved.

But on this sort of marble seat next to one of the pools, somebody had carved the board for an old Roman board game. So these people were sitting there enjoying the caldarium. It’s all steamy and warm, and they’re playing a board game while they got their feet in the pool. I love that, those little details are always the best.

And when often you see, when you pick up pieces of pottery where the potter has altered it a bit, just smooth things out, you’ll find their fingerprints or her fingerprints on there. So you got a 3000 year old fingerprint.

Jo: I guess then you’re thinking about like who they were. It was really what you were just saying about the ash. That’s really interesting to me because the ash almost has no story because something was burnt there. But what you were saying gave it historical context and it loops back.

Sean: Yeah. You’re right. And it looped back to the present day because I was there in ’93 just after the fall of communism. And the new government, which was democratic with a small D, was making it very clear to the Turkish minority that they might be better off moving back to Turkey. And so there was that whole tension.

So while that was going on in town, we’re up there seeing the remnants of the last time those two sides had a war.

Jo: Yeah, yeah. The historical perspective is so interesting. So one of the places you go a lot is to Egypt and you’ve got this Masked Man of Cairo series, and a lot of us do think, and on this show I’ve talked, we’ve talked about ancient Egypt, but you are writing about a different time period there. So tell us about that time period and what people might think differently.

Tell us more about your interest in more modern Egypt

Sean: I decided to do my series set in 1919 right after World War I. And that was when the first wave of the independence movement started in Egypt. During World War I, the British Empire basically took over. They had already had a lot of influence in Egypt, but it was still technically an Ottoman Province. But when Britain and the Ottoman Empire found themselves on opposite sides of the war, they took the mask off and named Egypt as a protectorate.

And then they brought in a lot of people for the Egyptian expeditionary force to work as laborers on the Western front, which was very hard on the people that had to go. And one of the ways they calmed down the Egyptian people was to say that they would have a seat at the table after the war to discuss independence.

Well that didn’t actually happen. So the Egyptians took the British at their word and said, well, no, we need to be in Versailles. And the British said, no. And then that kicked off the whole independence movement. So I found that to be very interesting time period to set it in.

And in a lot of my books, I explore colonialism. So I have three main characters in this series. One is Sir Augustus, who’s a World War I veteran. He’s a masked man because he’s lost half of his face. He has one of those masks that the French artists made – they would look at an old photograph of the person and make a mask that looked like their face, which sort of worked and sort of looked very disturbing. And he hates Europe, wants to live in Egypt, disapproves of colonialism, but is constantly benefiting from it.

Then I have Mustafa who is Nubian and that’s an interesting minority. They’re a very large minority in Egypt, but they’ve had to deal with a lot of racism at the hands of the Egyptians. And of course this being 1919, he experiences racism at the hands of the British too. But he’s also an archaeologist and Egyptologist. So he is very pro independence, but relies on European institutions for his career. So you got all these tricky problems.

And then we have Faisal, who’s a street kid who’s based on a lot of the street kids I’ve met in my neighborhood in Bab al-Luq in downtown Cairo, who doesn’t care about independence, he just wants his next meal.

So that’s an interesting trio and I wanted to have the historical background moving along in the background as they’re solving mysteries.

Jo: I mean you mentioned where you live in Cairo. If people want to see things in Egypt or in Cairo itself that are more from that period or from other periods that are not just ancient Egypt, like —

What are some of the places that you would recommend visiting?

Sean: Oh, it’s endless. I first went to Egypt in ’91 after I was working on a dig in Cyprus for the same reason everybody else did. I wanted to see the pyramids and the Sphinx and Karnak and all that, and I love that. But the more I kept going back, the more I discovered how much else there is.

And there’s an amazing number of beautiful mosques there, most of which foreigners are allowed in as long as you behave yourself and dress appropriately. There’s a lot of old medieval architecture. The old areas, what you call Islamic Cairo, although most of it of course is Islamic, is fascinating. You can walk around these old labyrinthine streets, and there is a thousand year old fountain and there was an 800 year old mosque and you go around.

And then there’s all the bazaars and all the smells and sights of that. As far as things specifically from the early 20th century, not so much because it was sort of this transition period. But when I’ve read accounts from that era and when I’ve wandered around the back streets of Cairo, there’s a lot that you can still recognize.

I mean, of course everyone’s got cell phones and lights and all that, but the pace of life, a lot of the clothing, a lot of the way that people still interact, the traditional crafts, they’re all still there. So that makes it very easy to research. I always tell my readers it’s inspiration made easy. I just go off to these places.

Jo: Just walking around. I mean, you mentioned the mosques there, obviously you said there are so many.

Is there one particular mosque that sticks out in your mind as particularly interesting or beautiful?

Sean: My personal favorite is the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, which is from about 800 AD, one of the oldest mosques in Cairo. And it’s based on the mosque in Samarra, in Iraq. And instead of having the stairs on the inside, it has the stairs on the outside. So you go up these winding stairs and you end up looking over this beautiful view of Cairo, and right next to it is the Gayer Anderson Museum.

It was this old house from the early 20th century that was built in the Islamic style, but it was actually owned by a western professor. And you can tour that and see his art collection, see all the interior. There’s several old stately homes that you can tour the interior.

I also went up the mosque of Samarra in Iraq, and that was terrifying because I’m acrophobic and there’s no railing for the external staircase. So you’re going up and up and up and the staircase gets narrower and narrower and narrower. And I get right up to the top and I have this photo taking a photo of my boot on the step and there’s no more space. And the same size of my boot is the bus that we came in all the way down at the bottom.

Jo: Oh. And that turns my stomach even just thinking about it.

Sean: Yeah. I have a fear of heights. But I had to go up it. I would’ve kicked myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t go up it, so I went up it.

Jo: That is interesting. I have, like, I do feel sick around heights and the last place I tried was Cologne Cathedral, and I tried to climb up the spire and about halfway up I just was like, I literally can’t, and then I had to sit on my bum and go down the stairs on my bum all the way down again. So, yeah, I don’t think I’ll try that, but that sounds interesting.

And you mentioned a museum there, and again, there’s loads of museums. And now things have changed a bit, haven’t they? Like when I was there, I guess it was like 25 years ago, the Museum of Antiquities was still the old one, like in town. And that’s now moved.

Have you been to that amazing new Antiquities museum?

Sean: Yeah, there’s actually a couple of new museums. The museum at Tahrir Square is still there, but they’ve taken a lot of the good stuff out, including King Tutankhamun. But the new Egyptian museum on the Giza Plateau right next to the pyramids is fantastic. It is huge.

I spent I think eight hours there in total, and I still didn’t get a proper look at it. I have to go back the next time I’m there. Amazing architecture. And the front hall is this series of steps with all these statues and sarcophagi. And then you get up to the museum proper where you go through the different periods as in a normal museum.

It is truly stunning. And then there’s a Museum of Egyptian Civilization, which is a smaller, sort of more bespoke museum that goes through all the periods, but also has a lot of modern stuff, including the different ethnic groups. There’s a section about the Nubian and a section about the Bedouin, Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, the delta.

So that’s all well worth seeing too. I got to see that with some Egyptian friends. Their daughter who was nine at the time, gave me the tour, so that was interesting. It’s always fun to follow a child through a museum the way they dart around and make associations that you wouldn’t think of.

Jo: Yeah, they get bored quite quickly.

But I go quite quickly through museums and I stop when I’m like, that’s the thing I want to spend more time with. Because I imagine, I mean, it was pretty overwhelming when I was there, but I imagine now, like you said, if you spent eight hours there, that’s a lot.

Sean: I’m a museum junkie. I can do it.

Jo: Yeah, you can do it. But I mean, a lot of people come into Cairo and do the pyramids and then leave, go down the Nile, up the Nile and do other bits quite quickly.

If people are in Cairo for even a couple of days, are there things they should see?

Sean: I would highly suggest Khan el-Khalili, which is the old market, which has been around for about a thousand years, and that is well worth seeing.

And when you’re in there, it’s very packed and there’s all these stalls and some of it’s tourist kitsch, but some of it is things for Egyptians to buy, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the spices and everything you’re seeing, but also look up because you’ll see all these old windows and these lovely arches and stuff. There’s people living up there too, you know, people peeking down, looking at you. So it’s well worth looking around there.

And also just relax, go to some of the cafes. The cafes are open for everybody. I’ve noticed a lot of foreigners are sort of hesitant about going to Egyptian cafes, but it’s never a problem. And I mean, Egyptian women go to cafes too, so they’re open for everybody and it’s a very relaxed cafe culture. The Egyptians are very Mediterranean that way.

So it’s well worth going to the cafes and getting a tea or a coffee and just watching the world go by. In my neighborhood in Bab al-Luq, which is down in the central part of old downtown, which has a lot of old 19th and early 20th century buildings during the big boom that they were having back then, there’s some lovely old shaded pedestrian roads where they’re just lined with cafes. It’s very relaxing.

Jo: Yeah. And I guess most people, in fact, I wouldn’t associate the word relaxing with Cairo.

I remember the traffic being particularly difficult and I guess also sometimes the heat, depending on what time of the year. Cultural stereotypes, I think make people afraid. And the media in fact, and of course there have been issues, there always are issues in every country, but people may think religious fundamentalism, there are potential issues. So what, how can you help people be more relaxed? Like how should they behave to make the most of it?

Sean: It’s easier because I’m a man, let’s just put that out there.

Women traveling with men will not have any problems at all. My wife’s been there a bunch of times, has never had a problem. Women traveling together tends to be okay. Just no mini skirts and halter tops. I mean, you’re in a Muslim country. I mean, I don’t wear shorts when I’m there. I always wear long pants, just get some light khaki pants or something. And it’s getting more accepted than it used to be, but it’s still not a good idea. And you can’t go into a mosque dressed that way.

Religious fundamentalism, the current junta of generals has done a very good job of crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, so there haven’t been any terrorist attacks for quite some time. That said, you will occasionally meet people that you don’t get a very good vibe off of. Although that happens to me all the time.

It’s sad to say, but I will not get into a taxi with an openly religious taxi driver because they always try to overcharge me.

Jo: Interesting. It’s tourist tax. You know there is a level of tourist tax that should be allowed, I think in any place. But you are more of a regular.

I mean, I guess the other thing is the street hawkers, some of whom are often children as well in some places. And that can be overwhelming. Like you feel like you should be buying something or giving money, and then as soon as you do, there are lots more. Is that still?

Sean: That is a problem. They’ve cleared them out a little bit, but see, I don’t mind the people who go around at night around the cafes trying to sell whatever it is they’re trying to sell. Because a lot of these kids, they’re not homeless, but they’re very poor. They’re probably living eight to a room. And everybody has to have a little job to supplement the income. And if it’s something I would reasonably want to buy, then I buy it. I don’t mind.

What I don’t like is the tourist hustlers who are like pushing you, like, oh, come to my shop. No, no, because then if you go to the shop, you’re doomed. They’re going to pressure you and pressure you and pressure you.

And you just have to learn to say no and mean it.

And one of the tactics that they sometimes use is if you’re refusing, you say, no, no, sorry, I’m just not interested in say, what? Are you racist? No, I’m not. No, I’m not racist. I just don’t want your plastic bust of Nefertiti.

Jo: Yeah, I think it’s especially at the tourist sites, I remember the, I think it was the Temple of Hatshepsut. And gosh, there were so many there. But there the coaches offload and I guess it’s a good spot. But be aware that that’s going to happen and just watch out for it.

Sean: And there’s no real way to avoid it.

The more you go, the more comfortable you get.

And the less they come after you, they realize, they sense it.

One thing that you do have to watch out for, and this isn’t happening in the new museum, but happens in the old Egyptian museum in Tahrir, is you’ll be taking photos or a video and some guy will come up to you, flash an ID in Arabic and say, I work for the museum. You’re not allowed to take photos, you don’t have permission. You have to give me 400 pounds. These guys are just hustlers. And what they’re flashing is not their museum ID. It’s actually their national ID.

Jo: Yeah, that’s a good one. I mean, a lot of the cathedrals in Europe, you do have to pay like an extra fee to take photos, but you do that at the front desk when you get your ticket, basically.

I would also say like, I traveled as an independent woman, but I went with a group, so I think this is easy enough, like there are millions of different groups you can join traveling in Egypt. So I guess also —

What are some other areas of Egypt that you find interesting that, again, are often overlooked in the rest of the country?

Sean: Oh, well, all of them, but that’s not a very good answer, is it?

Well, obviously Upper Egypt, Karnak, Aswan, Luxor, all that, but a lot of people go there. One of my favorite places is the Western desert and the oases in the Western desert. I have a whole book set in Bahariya, which is a very isolated oasis out in the middle of nowhere, way out past Cairo. You get on a bus and you drive and drive and drive and drive and drive.

And there’s some amazing stretches of desert out there. I went camping. Beautiful star filled nights where the sky felt like it was about 12 feet above your head. So many stars. You can’t even recognize the constellations, but amazing geography there, geology there where the wind will scour the rock into all these weird shapes. And there’s a White Desert, which is all this gypsum. And then there’s a Black Desert, which is all volcanic stuff. And so that was really, really interesting.

And there’s some archaeological sites in Bahariya as well. It’s a very different culture because they’re Bedouin who’ve settled and they settled hundreds of years ago. So they’re not Bedouin, they’re not Nile Valley folk, they’re Bahariya.

And the Faiyum is another more accessible oasis. It’s on a branch of the Nile, about three hours southwest of Cairo, and that has this lovely lake and there’s a large stretch of cultivated land there. And then you can go out in the desert, go see some old archaeological sites there and these amazing sand dunes.

And I’m actually putting them in the next book that’s coming out in August. My characters go there to solve a murder. And you can see what the locals call ‘sand whales,’ which are fossilized whales from when the whole area was an inland sea.

And what’s interesting about these whales is you might’ve heard how whales were originally land animals that became amphibious and then went into the sea. Well, these fossils are old enough that you can still see vestigial hind legs on them and their front legs turned into fins. It’s amazing.

Jo: That’s very cool. You can find archaeology everywhere.

Sean: Yes. There’s still regions I haven’t seen. There’s all these Coptic monasteries in the Red Sea area that I want to go to. I’ve been to the ones in Wadi Natrun, which is another road trip well worth doing. You can see monasteries that have been functioning since the fifth century.

Jo: The Coptics are fascinating. I still remember the first time I was in Jerusalem on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre and the Ethiopian Coptics there have a little shrine on the roof. They’re poor but close to the shrine.

Sean: That’s Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s an electric place. I love that.

Jo: Well that’s a whole other episode.

Sean: I haven’t been in years either.

Jo: No, I haven’t either. But yes, let’s just come onto an angle I wanted to tackle since you also write post-apocalyptic books. And I think this is so interesting because you are mainly historical and ex-archaeology and you think about this and I wondered —

What do you think we will leave in the historical record from our era?

Because it feels to me like we are so interested and we write about these times that are quite ancient.

And as you mentioned, even like the 1919, when you are writing like there isn’t necessarily that much from then. So what do you think about what will last?

Sean: Well, that’s a good, a lot of plastic. But other than that, that’s a good question. I mean, all this electronic data that’s gone very early, a lot of my very early writings is gone.

Jo: Disappeared.

Sean: You’re not launching this into space?!

Jo: Maybe, but no, we should. I mean, even our books, our books rot. I mean the books that last, this is what’s interesting. The books that last are usually made of, I guess there’s papyrus in Egypt, but like vellum or more organic matter, I guess.

Sean: There’s a great book called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, I think is the author, The World Without Us. And he looks at the theory, what would happen if all humans disappeared tomorrow, how much would be around? And so he looks at a lot of older sort of modern ruins.

He goes to the Green Line in Cyprus. Back in, I think it was ’72 or ’73, the Turks invaded Cyprus because they were having a fight with the Greek national party that wanted to join with Greece, there was a division that cut right through Nicosia and a couple other cities. And so there was this green line between the Turkish North and the Greek Cypriot South.

And there’s a strip there that has just been sitting there for 50 years and he got to visit it. He had to get visas from both sides and have guards go with him and everything, but what he was surprised was how much was gone, like so much had just fallen apart.

Things that you don’t think about like tires because tires dry out. And so there were cars there that he went to a gasoline station that had a stack of tires that all that was left were the rims. Like everything else had just shredded. There was just this sort of black dust and the heap around. That sort of thing.

A lot of the buildings had simply fallen in, even though they were solidly enough made back in the sixties or the fifties or whenever they had been built, because they just been sitting around for 50 years. Because he went in the 2010s. They had all fallen apart.

Jo: Yeah. And you wonder whether the like the Burj Khalifa for example, or the Shard in London, do they end up crumbling? Because like in London and in Egypt and Cairo, there are these buildings that are a thousand years old or you are excavating things that are much, much older.

Are these things going to last or are we just not building like that anymore or making things? I think we don’t really build to last though.

Sean: I give you a good example. I’m here in Oxford University doing research right now and I’m in the Bodleian Library, lovely library. It’s 600 years old, the oldest parts and they’re still solid and I can sit in there and work and everything is fine.

My wife is at the astrophysics department in a building that was built in the mid fifties.

Jo: Oh, they’re so ugly around there, aren’t they?

Sean: Brutalism! How can you put brutalist architecture in the middle of Oxford? I know it’s criminal. And the concrete’s already beginning to decay because it’s not fully waterproof — in England!

Jo: Which is crazy. I was at Mansfield College, which is right near that science area and yeah, it’s reasonable looking and has a nice chapel, but yeah, I mean, it’s completely different in different colleges and different time periods. But I mean, Oxford itself is a sort of time capsule, isn’t it?

Sean: Oh, sure. And I love that about it. I went to high table in Christ Church once, and the person who was sponsoring me to get in, because I’m not an Oxonian, therefore I just can’t go to these things.

Jo: Well, they wouldn’t let me in there!

Sean: She took me down the side passage that led to the kitchen and there was this huge slab of an open table. And I look at that, I’m like, that looks old. And she says, this might be the oldest thing in Oxford. Because it was just, it was obviously old growth and it was obviously medieval because it was just this big slab with legs.

And the top was literally this thick and it was shiny because it was so old, but there’s all these deep carved scratches in it and everything. And this table had been serving the university for literally centuries and it will outlast the astrophysics department and it’ll outlast our books. It’s also just too heavy to move, so it’s just going to stay there.

Jo: Interesting.

When you write your post-apocalyptic books, are you thinking about this view of history or casting your mind into a future where it goes horribly wrong?

Sean: Well, what I do with Toxic World is I decided, as much as I like zombies and all that, I didn’t want to use zombies or a plague or a meteor because I felt that was kind of a cop out.

What happens in my scenario is there’s resource depletion and overpopulation, and then World War III kicks off and a lot of things crumble, and then people start building up, and then there’s more wars and the countries fragment into city states, and there’s more wars and more degradation and et cetera.

There’s some nukes go off just for chuckles and there’s a bio war, so a bunch of animals go extinct and everything just slowly decays to the point where there’s only one town left called New City. And it’s not really a city. It only has 3000 people in it. And they barely are able to keep the lights on. And there’s ravaging hordes out there and toxic wasteland.

And sad to say, I think that that’s much more of a likely scenario that might actually, if we’re not careful, that might actually be how it goes down.

Jo: Except overpopulation? I think now we are basically dying off by not having children?

Sean: Well, some sections of the world and some sections still are growing. So it’s sort of a trade off. There are predictions that the rise in population’s going to level out. Whether it does or not, we shall see.

Jo: We should see, but I do find this interesting because as you say, like, let’s go back to that pile of ash that you were excavating again, evidence of war, and going back to Tel Megiddo in Israel, same thing.

Evidence of cities razed and destroyed and the next city built on top of it, and then the next city, and on and on.

And just these levels and levels. I mean, that is history, but what you are also writing is, that’s also the future. I guess are we just stuck in these cycles?

Sean: There’ll be decline and then people will rise up.

I mean, you’re seeing certainly Europe’s, I would say Europe is definitely in decline on a number of levels. China seems to be booming. How viable that is in the long term is hard to say. I mean, they only really started this communist capitalist experiment 30 years ago. So it’s way too early to say what’s going to happen.

Some people say the United States is in decline. I’m not so sure they are. They’re certainly undergoing a fundamental change. Where that’s going to end up, I have no idea. But I wouldn’t write off the United States quite yet.

But all empires die and the American Empire will die. The Chinese empire will die. And the next one, the Canadian Empire.

Jo: When we have it. The glorious days, the Canadian Empire. When was that?

Sean: It’s coming next!

Jo: Well, it’s so funny because I agree with you obviously being British and feeling like we live past the end of empire, so the end of the British Empire was a while ago now, you know, not in our lifetime. And like you’re in Oxford. I’m in Bath.

We live in this kind of nice museum of Europe. The whole continent is like a museum.

And then you go to America and I agree with you. I think America’s still got that sort of pushing forward energy.

And then what I like doing though, as a British person is going to Portugal because I feel like their empire died before the British Empire. And so I see the future of Britain in Portugal, which let’s face, it’s got a great quality of life. And it’s got some lovely parts about it, but a lot of people don’t realize how big an empire Portugal once had.

Sean: Oh, it was vast.

Jo: Huge. And there’s a podcast called Hardcore History, and Dan Carlin, the host, has a book The End is Always Near, which is about this collapse of civilizations. I guess you talked about decline, but is there anything else, like if we think about traveling to places. Because I didn’t go to New Orleans before the big hurricane.

Sean: So I haven’t been since.

Jo: Oh, you haven’t been since, okay. So I have been since, but I remember being invited to go visit someone and I said, ‘oh no, I’ll do that another time.’ And then obviously Katrina happened and you know, all of that. But are there places where you visit and it’s like, okay —

Are there are places that we need to see because things are going to change and they might disappear?

Sean: I’m more aware of that ever since ISIS. Because when I was much younger in the mid nineties, I traveled to Syria before the Civil War and spent a couple months there. Wonderful. Had a great time. Saw Palmyra, saw a lot of that.

I also did some journalism in Iraq between, in this a peaceful period between the surge and the rise of ISIS. And there was this sort of a lull for about a year and a half, and I got in right then. And so I saw a lot of sites there. So I saw a lot of places that ISIS wiped off the map.

I also saw several Christian communities near the border of Syria that became ISIS territory. And so the people I met and the towns I saw, well, they just don’t exist anymore. So yeah, that made me very aware.

I had always been aware because I was an archaeologist, when you are working on a city and nobody knows what it was called or any of the people who lived there, it changes your perception a little bit. But when it was people I actually met and places I actually saw myself, and then they got wiped off the map, that really brought it home to me.

Everything’s fragile and there’s nasty people in the world.

Jo: Or just natural disasters. Things that happen.

My Map of Shadows and my Mapwalker series has this split world. And on the other side of the map are all the places that got pushed out of our maps because like you mentioned, Iraq for example, someone drew it on a map and there it was, all these places, those lines don’t necessarily exist and they change and that also shifts people. But it is super interesting to think what might go.

Sean: But things endure too, which is something that I’ve always found interesting. I mean, Iraq, the name is Uruk. The old city state from 3000 BC.

There is a, since you’ve lived in London, I suppose, there’s a road called Houndsditch, and they were doing some excavations there. The Museum of London. And they found that it was a ditch outside the old Roman wall, and they found a bunch of dog skeletons in it. It’s where they dumped their dead dogs. And that ditch later got paved over, turned into a road that got named Houndsditch.

You talk to people in Houndsditch, they have no idea why it’s called Houndsditch. But that name got preserved and passed through three different languages to make it to our present day.

So some things will endure, and I think that people interactions, the more I read history, people don’t change a huge amount.

I mean, culturally there’s shifts, but what we want out of life and how we interact with friends and family, I don’t think they’re vastly different. And so I think some things remain the same.

Jo: Yeah, we still want to sit on the edge of that bath and play a game.

Sean: Exactly. I can just totally see these people with their feet in the water and they’re playing a game. I love that.

Jo: That’d be me. Although I might have a book rather than play a game, but well, let’s just come back, we could talk all day actually, I think about all this kind of stuff, but I am interested just in an attitude to travel. So you obviously, you travel a lot. You’re a relaxed type of guy. You’ve got a lot of experience traveling and then people might be listening and like, well, how do I do that?

What’s your overarching tip for people who want to travel but maybe just struggle?

Sean: Slow down, see less for longer. I mean, I understand that not everyone can go off for two months a year to Cairo like I can, but find a place you like and just hang out.

I’m very lucky that I’m married to a woman that likes to travel that way. Because so many people want, it’s like, oh, they have a whole checklist of things I have to see. I need to see a dozen things. That drives me insane. Just stresses me out. I’d rather stay home and work, but slow down. Have a second coffee at a cafe in Tahrir Square or go for a walk at night or in Alexandria just sit by the seaside and look out. That sort of thing.

And try to meet people. I often travel alone, especially if I’m going to crazier places. I’m planning a trip to Algeria for probably November, and I’m going to go alone, because if you’re alone, you’re going to meet more people and that’s a lot of fun.

And you can do this as a woman in the Middle East, you’re just going to be meeting women. And what’s been fun is I’ve traveled, like with my wife, but with other women beforehand, we’d travel in the Middle East together and then she’d go off with ladies and I’d go off with the guys and we’d come back at the end of the evening and we’d have had completely different experiences. And so we’d just compare notes. So that was kind of fun.

So it’s very doable, and as a woman, solo traveler is, if you keep your head about you, it’s not going to be any more dangerous than London. Perhaps less dangerous than London. London’s maybe not the best one to compare it to, but less dangerous than St. Louis. How about we put it like that?

There’s very little street crime in Cairo. There’s just hassling in Cairo. And so I would just say go for it. Relax, spend more time, talk to the locals and just have a good time. And people tend to be fairly laid back the more you can. You more, you reach out and try to understand and try to speak the local language, that helps too.

I did a project in Harar, which is an old medieval walled city in eastern Ethiopia, and they have their own language, Harari, which is only spoken in this little walled city. And this city is not really a city. It’s about 50,000 people. And I remember the first time I managed to make a coherent sentence in Harari. Everyone just flipped out. There weren’t very many more after that, but the fact that I tried enough to actually make a sentence in Harari and don’t ask me to repeat it because it’s long since gone, being able to do that, that really helps.

People are just generally curious about one another.

And people want to meet, especially in more remote areas because they don’t get to meet very many foreigners. And we’re trained with this idea that the world’s hostile and you watch the news and everyone’s blowing each other up. But mostly people just want to relax and enjoy their life and have a good time and just like anybody else.

And you get them on that level and everything’s generally okay.

Jo: Fantastic. Right, so this is the Books and Travel podcast.

What are a few books that you recommend around the topics we’ve discussed today?

Sean: One crazy book that I just read recently is Walking The Nile by Levison Wood. Have you read that?

Jo: Oh yeah.

Sean: Total Mad Dogs and Englishman type book. This guy decides to walk the length of the Nile. And he doesn’t start at Lake Victoria. He starts in Rwanda. Good job. And that’s very well written and very interesting. It has a bit of the sort of dashing British adventurer ignoring local politics. He’s very much that. But it is well written and it is a lot of fun to read.

And I was just in the Oxfam shop near my house, and I picked up this, which is an excellent classic book on Morocco, Morocco That Was by Walter Harris. He was a correspondent for the Times around the turn of the century. So he wrote several books. And Walter Harris traveled all through Morocco in the teens, in the twenties, just my era.

And described a lot of the old kasbahs and meeting the Sultan and the old bandits that used to be around there, but also a lot of cultural mores and customs that are still around today. So that’s a lot of fun.

Jo: Fantastic. And then just tell us a bit about your books if people want to try them.

Sean: Oh, I was just at a book fair here in Oxford and sold almost all the copies of my books. But I do have, this is book five. I sold book one through four. This is for the Masked Man of Cairo series. This is the case of the Asphyxiated Alexandrian. This is where they go up to Alexandria searching for Alexander’s tomb, which of course has been long since lost.

Sir Augustus has to go because one of his old war buddies gets murdered. And so he has to go find it. I don’t have anything from the Toxic World or Moroccan mysteries because those all sold out. But I do have a copy of a standalone I did based in modern Tangier called The Last Hotel Room.

And this I wrote right after the Syrian civil War kicked off and there was always a small Syrian community in Tangier in Northern Morocco. And what the King of Morocco decided to do was allow Syrians in without a visa. So suddenly there was this huge influx, but he didn’t give them citizenship or residency, so they couldn’t go to school. The kids couldn’t go to school, the parents couldn’t work.

I mean, they weren’t getting bombed, but they were stuck in this sort of limbo and they couldn’t get to Europe. Not at that moment. They started going later. And I was watching this influx. And so I wrote a book about some of the Syrian refugee kids that I met, and a portion of the last hotel room goes to a charity there. There’s a few charities I like to support for kids in the Middle East. Because there’s a lot of need. It’s pretty rough.

Jo: Interesting. You have books about so many things.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Sean: Well, I’m at seanmclachlan.net. And I’m on all the socials at WriterSean, on Instagram, my Facebook author page. And I just started a Pinterest account, so I’m putting up things on Pinterest as well and Amazon, of course.

Jo: Well, brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, Sean.

Sean: Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversation between Jo Penn and Sean McLachlan about archaeology, Egypt, Morocco, travel, and writing.

The post Egypt Beyond the Pyramids And Glimpsing The Future In History With Sean McLachlan appeared first on Books And Travel.

Zoe is the author of 630 Miles Braver: Midlifing on the South West Coast Path. She’s also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an award-winning teacher, and host of the HeadRightOut podcast.

• Why Zoe chose the South West Coast Path to mark a rite of passage into midlife
• The beautiful highlights and the brutal, challenging aspects of the 630-mile trail
• Overcoming fears of walking and wild camping solo
• Practical advice on training, managing physical pain, and preparing for a long walk
• How the experience built lasting resilience and changed her life trajectory
• Zoe’s next epic adventure with her husband: walking the 7,300-mile coastline of Great Britain

You can find Zoe at HeadRightOut.com

You can find my tips on long-distance multi-day solo walking in my book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways, and more pilgrimage resources here.

Transcript of the interview

The post Facing Fears And Finding Resilience In Midlife: Long-Distance Walking With Zoe Langley-Wathen appeared first on Books And Travel.

You can find Merryn at MerrynGlover.com

Transcript of the interview

The post Writing Partition: Merryn Glover on History, Home, and the Hill Stations Of India appeared first on Books And Travel.

Durham Cathedral stands on a rocky peninsula in a tight loop of the River Wear. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site (inscribed 1986) together with Durham Castle, recognised as an outstanding example of Norman (Romanesque) architecture and for its influence on the development of Gothic.

Construction began in 1093 for a new Benedictine monastery to house the relics of St Cuthbert and attract pilgrims.

The massive alternating piers, the great round cylindrical columns incised with chevrons, spirals and lozenges, are a hallmark of Norman decorative masonry.

The nave has some of the earliest large-scale stone rib vaults in Europe, with pointed transverse arches, a key aspect of Gothic architecture.

Looking up to the crossing, facing the Quire.

St Cuthbert’s remains were brought to Durham in 995 and translated to a new shrine in 1104. His tomb remains behind the high altar, although the medieval shrine was destroyed at the Reformation.

I lit a candle at the shrine in memory of my crossing to Lindisfarne at the end of the St Cuthbert’s Way (in my book Pilgrimage).

Fragments of St Cuthbert’s Anglo-Saxon oak coffin (AD 698), carved with runic and Roman-letter inscriptions, were recovered in 1827 and 1899. They’re reconstructed and displayed in the Treasures of St Cuthbert inside the 14th-century Great Kitchen. No photos allowed there.

The Galilee Chapel at the west end (late 12th century) houses the tomb of the Venerable Bede. The Galilee Chapel preserves traces of medieval polychromy—painted patterning on its slender columns—rare survivals that hint at the cathedral’s original colour.

The Chapel of the Nine Altars (mid-13th century) extends the east end in a fully Gothic style, creating space for multiple side altars to serve the crush of pilgrims. The Chapel of St Aidan is one of the chapels at the east end.

I much prefer modern glass to the medieval stained glass, so I appreciated The Transfiguration Window (below), gifted by the Friends of Durham Cathedral in honour of Michael Ramsey (1904-1988) who was bishop of Durham and Archbishop of Canterbury.

Located far down the South Quire Aisle (south wall), it shows Christ radiant with Moses and Elijah, and weaves in Durham’s heritage. Pilgrims approach the cathedral (one resembling Ramsey) and St Cuthbert prays on Inner Farne island, rendered with silver staining, hand painting, and acid-etched layers.

The famous Sanctuary Knocker on the north door (the original is in the cathedral museum) signified Durham’s medieval right of sanctuary: fugitives who grabbed it could claim temporary protection while their case was arranged.

The Cloisters linked the buildings where monks once read, wrote, and studied, to the cathedral. Laid out in the late 12th century and remodelled in the early 15th, the oak-panelled ceilings are medieval.

I loved this little angel roof boss in the Cloisters!

Durham Cathedral’s archives hold early 13th-century copies of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, displayed periodically in the museum. They were on display when I visited.

I loved my visit to Durham Cathedral. I hope you have a good trip if you visit!

Books about or set in Durham

• The Shrine — LJ Ross. Crime thriller. Chaos descends on the sleepy, historic city of Durham and, when the smoke clears, a priceless artefact that once belonged to Saint Cuthbert is missing. With tensions running at an all-time high, unable to trust the local police, can DCI Ryan and his team bring a killer to justice — and restore Cuthbert’s cross to its natural resting place? You can also listen to an interview with the author, LJ Ross, about how Northumberland inspires her books.
• Cuddy — Benjamin Myers. A bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras – from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity.
• The Durham Deception — Philip Gooden. For the newly-weds Tom and Helen Ansell life is no honeymoon, as they are drawn into a murky underworld of Victorian spiritualism and stage magic when they’re sent on a mission to the stunning cathedral city of Durham.
• Durham Cathedral: The Shrine of St Cuthbert — This beautifully illustrated guide introduces the reader to the glories of Durham, and features the newly opened ‘Open Treasure’ exhibition.
• The Black Velvet Gown — Catherine Cookson. Durham in the 1830’s. The compelling story of a mother and daughter, often at odds with each other, facing the need to challenge and fight the prejudices of an age.

The post Durham Cathedral, England appeared first on Books And Travel.

Oliver Smith is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain.

• The double lives of pilgrimage places, and how ordinary locations can offer transcendent experiences
• Lindisfarne’s tidal causeway
• The tension between commercial tourism and genuine spiritual seeking at sacred sites
• Iona’s remote Scottish island setting and the challenging journey required to reach it
• Walsingham’s remarkable history from medieval powerhouse to modern multicultural pilgrimage destination
• Why Glastonbury might be Britain’s best pilgrimage
• The philosophy of traveling deeper not further, and finding extraordinary meaning in familiar places

You can find Oli at OliverSmithTravel.com

You can find more Pilgrimage Resources here, as well as my book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Oliver Smith. Hi Oli.

Oli: Hello, how are you doing?

Jo: Oh, it’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Oli is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain, which we are talking about today. It’s a fantastic book.

Now, Oli, I wanted to get straight into it. So you say in the book, although you’ve traveled all over the world, you say quote from the book,

“What interested me now were those places that promised a kind of travel beyond what could be charted on an ink or pixel map.”

So I wondered if you could start with that, because you’ve been to all these tick list travel places. What about those that are these soulful journeys?

Oli: I guess what really interests me is that a lot of these places that feature in the book, they sort of live double lives, you know?

If I pick one at random, or one near where you are in the country. If we think about Glastonbury for example, it’s fascinating because people go there with such huge expectation. For some people it’s a place that unlocks other worlds to them. The tor might be a portal to some world of the fairies or some world of Arthurian legend, or it might be something to do with Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus Christ walking in Somerset and that old legend, you know, so much is invested in it.

Yet at the same time, Glastonbury is a place where if you go to the high street, there’s a Boots. There is a pub selling the usual repertoire of lagers and warm beers and Nobby’s Nuts behind the bar, you know, these places. I think all of them, to some degree in the book, they are ordinary, mundane places that people live in and people pass by every day.

But then they offer, they promise a kind of an extra level, which is detectable to some people and isn’t to others. So it is that kind of duality. I think what really interested me when I was writing this book.

Jo: Yeah, and I guess, well it’s almost a bigger question because when you look at your career as a travel writer and you mentioned their expectation, which I think is a fantastic word for so much of travel, you could pick any of the tick list places in the world and say, well, you know, that would be amazing. And then perhaps it’s not.

I always think of Venice because I went to Venice one winter and it flooded and it stank and it was meant to be amazing, but it wasn’t. So I did really just wonder like —

Why write a pilgrimage book when you have traveled so many wonderful places?

Oli: I think one thing that can be said about all the places I’ve visited in this book is that there are places where you learn an awful lot about humanity and the human condition.

People often gravitate to pilgrimage places at these kind of weightless moments of their lives when they’re sort of on a hinge. Perhaps they’ve lost someone who is dear to them. Perhaps they’ve been made redundant. Perhaps they’re looking for direction, they’re going through a rite of passage.

But they are often people who are quick to tell you their story. They’re quick to open their heart. And I found myself getting in such deep and involving and fascinating conversations with people.

I think my pilgrimage book is possibly a little bit different to a lot of the other ones that are out there. It’s not really about me. I’m more of a kind of witness perhaps. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that these places didn’t have some magic that I felt on some level. But I think it is primarily about looking at these 12 places, sort of different characters as well as being character places – they are rich in characters themselves.

So yeah, I think you will have the best conversations if you go to wherever it might be. Walsingham on a pilgrimage day, or Stonehenge solstice or whatever it might be.

Jo: Well one of the places that you went is Lindisfarne and I love that you slept in the rescue box. Now I’ve walked across the sands. It was one of the highlights of the St. Cuthbert’s Way. I had just a wonderful time.

Tell us about the crossing to Lindisfarne

Oli: I think what makes Lindisfarne really interesting is its geography. That tidal element to Lindisfarne is something that’s not entirely unique, because you also get it at St. Michael’s Mount. You also get it at a couple of Holy Islands in the Severn Estuary, I think as well. But on that scale, the idea of taking a walk of three miles across a path that twice a day is completely submerged, is quite a wonderful thing.

And I wrote in the book that I think that path has many lessons. The idea that you only have a finite amount of time. The idea that you need to make the best of that time, that’s something that’s instructive for life on a much bigger level.

But I think probably what’s more interesting is the element of vulnerability there. You know, the idea that you are walking across the sea and the sea will be coming back for you very shortly, and you run the risk every time you step onto that path.

And it’s fascinating how there’s this sort of perpetual drumbeat through the summer of stories of people getting stuck on the causeway. It can be someone who often has got some quite flashy car and they think they can go straight through it. And then they go in the drink sort of halfway across. It’s also quite often people who are from countries where there aren’t tides. So people from central Europe, even the Mediterranean, you know, people sort of drive halfway across the causeway and they think it’s a car parking space, and they go for a little wander and they come back and the sea’s risen again. And suddenly their car is steering wheel deep in water.

But there’s so much biblical symbology in that, you know, the idea of the floods, the idea of the seas parting for Moses. I think all of that kind of echoes very slightly around the Lindisfarne Causeway, both the tarmac road and the Pilgrims Way. I think all those things are important.

I mean, I guess the other thing to say is the start of it all, Saint Aidan chose Lindisfarne because of this tidal rhythm. Because there’s these hours where the island is closed off from the world and the monks there would be in their solitude. They would be praying. And then there are those hours where the door opens in a way and they can go out into the world. They can spread the word. So it’s not an accident that the monastery is situated there.

I think the one thing that is absolutely extraordinary about Lindisfarne that just doesn’t get spoken about enough is that almost every weekend or every other weekend in summer. Maybe that’s a bit too much. Maybe every other weekend or once a month, something like that, a car will go under in the causeway and these people will be in the car. The water will be going up, they’ll be calling the RNLI, they’ll probably be in a panic. RNLI will turn up in their lifeboat and then they’ll fish them out and they’ll go back to the sea houses and their car will be absolutely kaput.

And there’s even a cottage industry. There’s a little garage by the causeway that seems to – I mean, it seemed to me that their business was essentially going out there, picking up the car and dragging it back.

But in living memory, there’s no record of anyone ever having drowned. You see how fast that water moves and you see how dangerous it can be. And you can see how clueless people are. And there were a few people who did sort of weigh it over in their minds and say to me, well, there is, that is almost miraculous. The fact that nobody has ever come a cropper there in living memory, or even, I think even longer than that. I think there was sort of a muttering of something happened a hundred years ago. But it’s quite extraordinary how that’s the case.

Jo: So I gotta come back to the box. Because we can picture this in our mind. So just explain what the walk looks like and what is the box and the poles and everything.

Oli: Sure, sure. Sorry, I got carried away there. So you go across the causeway and say you’re going out at low tide, it sort of looks almost like a little bit of a desert. And then you’ve got the two routes, the Pilgrims Way, which is the walking path, which sort of goes in a straight line, and then the metal causeway, which is for cars.

And on both of them you find these shelters. On the Pilgrims Way, it almost looks a bit like a tree house without a tree as it were. This sort of rickety, kind of slightly precarious platform on stilts that’s designed that, if you get caught by the tide, you can rush up there and you can wait it out.

But on the metal causeway where the cars are, I think just by the deepest point, but just by the point where people tend to get stuck, they’ve essentially put what looks like what looks like a garden shed on stilts. And that hovers by quite a deep channel. So it is this really weird thing that looks like someone’s sort of taken their garden shed from B&Q or from Homebase or wherever, and they’ve propped it on four concrete legs and stuck it sort of up in the sky. Almost like the umpire at Wimbledon or something. Do you know what I mean?

And if you go in there, you actually realize it’s a bit more sturdy than that. It’s actually built bespoke by the council, by Northumberland council, I think it was. And it’s quite cozy in there, but I went up there because I thought the most interesting thing about Lindisfarne for me was that betweenness, that sort of being halfway between being an island. Not an island, being a tidal island. And that kind of act of the water, severing it, cutting it off, and then retreating and it’s like this umbilical cord that kind of gets cut and then reattaches every – so, I mean, reattaches, it’s not particularly good metaphor, you know what I mean?

But yeah, I sat out there for however long it was, eight hours or something. I was really careful to make sure no one spotted me so they didn’t try and rescue me. But when you are up there, it is quite a kind of, you know, you’re at this gateway to a holy island. And Lindisfarne in high peak season is so crazy busy. But if you’re there, you know, in the middle. Kind of in the causeway on the gatehouse as it were. It’s just total silence, total peace, beautiful views and just seals kind of swimming up and down the channel. And you maybe there more than in the village. You get a sense of what it might’ve been for Cuthbert, for Aidan, for those saints who are so important to the story of Lindisfarne.

Jo: When I walked over, I heard this sound and I was like, what is that sound? And it was the seals singing, which apparently happens sometimes. And then of course it’s a bird sanctuary as well. So it is incredibly beautiful.

But you mentioned earlier about the duality of these places, and you did mention there that the village is really busy, and this is one of the interesting things about pilgrimage in general. There is an industry and I guess there always was, you know, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Obviously there’s always been an industry and I found that really hard, walking into the village with my wet boots and everything and my backpack and I was like, this is, and everyone looks at you weird because they’ve come off a coach.

How was that, with many of the places you visited, the industry versus the spirituality side?

Oli: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Because you said it was always there. I think it was always there. The commercial side of life is almost impossible to escape in pilgrimage locations.

I mean, one example I often talk about is if you go to the square that marks the finishing line of the Camino and you see these people gathering there. And they’re often in extremely heightened states and some of them are almost euphoric. And it’s this extremely kind of beautiful, poignant moment.

And then there’s the cathedral, which is obviously extraordinary itself, but then parked between the pilgrims and the cathedral. There’s often one of those little sightseeing road trains. Do you know the one that’s sort of like halfway between a bus and a train and there’s someone on a loudspeaker and maybe it plays a little song and it might even have a smiley face on the front of it, but that’s standing between the pilgrims and the cathedral and is just evidence for me of just how people will spy a buck in places where people spiritually gravitate. And that’s always been the way I think.

I think it also applies to lots of things. It applies to souvenirs, trinkets, pilgrims’ badges, whatever it might be, rosary beads, these, I think these are the original gift shops in a way. You know, when pilgrims go somewhere and they want something to take the magic of that destination back with them.

But it also applies in terms of the commercial side of things. I think it is to do with, I mean, you said the Canterbury Tales, like, I think pilgrimage for many people is about boozing and about going out. And if you hear about those stories of Shikoku Japan, where pilgrimage for many people is just sort of a pretext to go out there and just live the high life and kind of see the world a bit and have some fun. That’s one strand of it. I’m not saying that’s definitive for many people. It is a really lofty endeavor. And for a lot of people, I think these two things kind of mingle, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not so comfortably.

But yeah, I think the commercial side of things, bathos, these things will always be there, I think.

These places they promise escape and transcendence on one level, but then on another level, totally fail to deliver that. And I think it’s worth being honest about that.

Jo: I think so too. And again, it comes back to what you said about expectation. And in fact, the only place I sort of found that solitude and nature was on the St. Cuthbert’s Way because it’s so remote, in terms of the walk, whereas then arriving at Lindisfarne.

But I wanted to ask you about somewhere else, which is Iona, because I haven’t been, and part of me is kind of scared because of these expectations. So you say in the book

“More than anywhere I traveled for this book, Iona seemed a place that prompted wild infatuations. Dreams drifted northward to settle on this little Scottish island.”

So tell us about Iona.

Oli: I think here again, it’s to do with geography. I mean, I think the fact is for most people in Great Britain, Iona will almost certainly be a long way away from where you live unless you happen to live on the island of Mull or Oban or wherever it might be. It’s somewhere that through our modern eyes is at one removed from the rest of the world.

You know, it’s an island off an island off an island. If you count Great Britain as well. It’s at the edge of, it’s the edge of the Ross of Mull. It’s also kind of quite, it has a different feel to the Isle of Mull, which it neighbors and which is the route there. It’s geologically different. It looks kind of different.

And the way it’s regarded by many people is, you know, this is one of the first Christian outposts in Great Britain, happening around the same time as Canterbury emerges and that it’s at the wild edge of the world. You know, that this kind of little perch on the cusp of the Atlantic, which is kind of untrue in terms of history. Because Iona was actually very well connected. It was close to Ireland in those times. The way of getting around was not by land, but by sea. And it was on a kind of fairly established network of sea roads.

But I mean, yeah, that doesn’t stop the fact that it’s sort of seen as a sort of wilderness pilgrimage in many ways to, and there is no way getting there is easy. You will have to get a ferry or you have to get to Oban for a start, which could be umpteen train connections through riding the West Highland line through beautiful glens, a ferry to Mull, another wild road across Mull, which is kind of only just very slightly wider than your car, possibly narrower. And then you get to a ferry, another ferry port. Then you get a lot. So by the time you got there, whether you like it or not, you’ve made a kind of pilgrimage of one sort.

So I think that those are some of the reasons why, I mean of, and of course it’s hugely historically significant. It’s where Saint Columba, one of those early Christian saints of the British Isles established his monastery, in whatever it was, the seventh century I think it was. It’s at the very beginning of the story. It has the same elements as many pilgrimage sites across Britain, which is they were destroyed by reformations of one kind or another. And so that, you know, the ruins are often part of it.

And some people might find that kind of disappointing. Perhaps people from a Roman Catholic background might go there and see things being smashed to rubble, but I think perhaps in England we’re a bit more conditioned to find some kind of poetry in that, when we think of Tintern Abbey or Glastonbury Abbey or great monasteries like Rievaulx and Fountains and places like that.

They almost have their own kind of majesty in decay. And there’s an element of that I think about Iona. When you get there and you just sort of see these kind of slightly weathered. Pieced back together, Christian crosses. There is certainly some, yeah, there’s something stirring about all those things, I think.

Jo: And I guess one of the other things about it is where it is, physically as you said, so for people listening who don’t know the geography sort of very northwest. Realistically, you’ve got a lot of weather arriving, so, and you, I think you were there for a week, right?

How was the weather? How was that wildness around it?

Oli: Yeah, I mean it’s one of those places that you go and you can go and stand on a west facing cliff and you’ll have the kind of entire Atlantic blowing up down your face and you sort of almost get this kind of facelift from quite how intense it is. And that’s hugely stimulating.

And some people in the community there, of community with a big C that religious community in Iona Abbey today, someone said that’s almost like an image of God, this kind of sea, which is all powerful, which is vast and unknowable and it has that kind of element of the divine, of the almighty about it, I’d say. That’s certainly part of it.

And then the origin story of Iona, of St. Columba coming from Ireland. Sailing in this tiny little coracle across these insanely wild seas. These are kind of real, Channel Five trawler program seas where they’re just flinging around boats and it’s all rags of white surf. It’s not something we’re used to if you live near the English Channel or the North Sea or even the Irish Sea, they’re not quite on the same scale. I think all those things are part of Iona’s appeal, you know? I mean, it is a hugely historically significant place. There’s no two ways about it.

Jo: I like that kind of, we can’t control the weather and we can’t control God, and we’re sort of trying to find that in that place.

I also want to ask you about Walsingham because there was a point in history when it was a super, super famous place.

And I would bet that many people listening, probably most people listening to this, have never heard of Walsingham. So you say it’s unique in Britain in being a tiny village, shouldering the weight of its holy past. Tell us about that.

Oli: Yeah, I mean it’s a little village in Norfolk, which is sort of, I mean it’d be wrong to say Norfolk is remote in the context of England, but it’s a little bit more out the way. It’s kind of this bit of part of this bit of land that sticks out into the sea that incorporates a few, a couple of other counties as well. And it’s kind of a bit of a holiday heartland as well. Some lovely beaches there. And has a lot of very, very pretty kind of villages with flint, these kind of flint on the facade that makes all the houses kind of quite sparkly and lovely in a way.

But it’s fascinating that sort of in the midst of this kind of quite quintessentially English, slightly Miss Marple-esque landscape. There’s a lovely little village, which at the dawn of the, well, no, actually, was it 1061 something? There was an apparition of the Virgin Mary before a Saxon noblewoman. That’s a long time before other sites of other more famous sites of Marian apparitions, like Lourdes, like Fatima, like Medjugorje in Bosnia. This is a good several centuries before all of those.

And yeah, the fact is that this tiny little village was one of the kind of major pilgrimage sites of Christendom. It was ranked alongside Canterbury, and kind of only a few pegs below Rome, Santiago, it was mentioned in the same breath as Jerusalem by some people that, you know, people would go to this little village, that there would be royal pilgrimages there, kings would be going there.

And then suddenly, the English reformation happens. And this little place experiences the same fate as all the pilgrimage destinations in England at that time. These monasteries are all taken apart, smashed to bits. The icons, the shrines, are destroyed. Suddenly this sort of sleepy village goes back to being sleepy again for another 400 years or so.

And it was only at the dawn of the 20th century, where the local vicar, Alfred Hope Patten. He decided to kind of resurrect it in a small way. And so when you go to Walsingham today, it’s a place that kind of, you know. Its sanctity is originally medieval. Originally about a thousand years ago there was this Marian apparition, but then you go there and everything looks like something from the start of the 20th century.

The church sort of looks almost a bit like a kind of early BBC building or something. And the shrine is conspicuously quite new and shiny and is only, you know, only less than a hundred years old. And that this place has sort of had this sort of second life after its sort of renaissance at the start of the 20th century.

I mean, the counterpoint now is that obviously with the decline of church going that fewer and fewer people are going there. I mean, in the 1930s, there were special trains laid on from London, taking people there. Right through the 20th century, coach loads of people would go from their home parish on pilgrimage there. And now those numbers are dwindling. COVID dealt a big blow to the place. And now it’s just sort of quietly kind of ticking along.

The really fascinating thing for me about Walsingham is how it is, you know, almost, I mean, like you said, a lot of English people will not have heard of this place. And even people in Norfolk will probably not have heard of this place.

But if you go there, you will find like large numbers of Latin American people who happen to be working in London, you’ll find huge numbers of Tamil people, from Birmingham or from the Midlands, even from London, who, I mean, the biggest pilgrimage to this place now is the Tamil pilgrimage. Where these fields fill up with cars and this place that’s in the middle of Norfolk. It’s in the middle of kind of Brexit land and a large majority of people, they’re kind of white, Anglo-Saxon people. And then suddenly there’s this very highly diverse and really quite wonderful little village in the middle of it all. I think that’s something quite lovely.

Jo: And I wonder, because you said it looks quite modern and you also mentioned there the decline in church going, but actually there is a renaissance in pilgrimage. And people do like visiting. I mean, I’m not a Christian and I’ve done several pilgrimages and I feel an attraction to the ruins and the great cathedrals and these things.

I haven’t been to Walsingham, I’m not attracted to it because maybe it’s too modern. Do you think that’s maybe one of the reasons it hasn’t come back like some of the other places?

Oli: Yeah, hugely. I think that’s really interesting. How some pilgrimage places will speak to people of kind of less certain faith and others don’t.

I mean, someone asked me the other day for a piece they were writing what I consider to be Britain’s foremost pilgrimage destination now. The classic answer would’ve been Canterbury. Or indeed, Walsingham would’ve been a candidate for a lot of British history. And then, you know, Lindisfarne is also important, but I think even though it’s kind of second tier in the kind of more historical stakes, I think Glastonbury is the biggest pilgrimage destination now in Britain. Just because it means so many different things to different people. It is of importance to Anglican and Catholic communities. But it also brings in neopagan new age people. It brings in people who are looking for some kind of nebulous idea of nationhood as well. Those Arthurian legends that somehow this place has a kind of seed of an origin story about Britain embedded within it.

But also, I mean, I think there’s a logistical argument that the biggest gathering in Britain, the Glastonbury festival, which happens just a few miles down the road and a few days ago. I mean, that’s a pilgrimage for many people. If you look deep. If you kind of look a little bit more closely, you can see that those, some of those things, things like the pyramid stage, that was kind of an energy center. And there are pilgrimage elements to the Glastonbury Festival today.

So, I mean, yeah, I mean, Walsingham, it doesn’t have that ancient kind of draw of Iona, it doesn’t have the wilderness feel of Lindisfarne. It’s not got an enormous cathedral at the end of it, like Canterbury. And accordingly, while pilgrimage is in renaissance in many ways, it’s being left behind to some extent. I think, relative to those other places.

Jo: So I wanted to also ask you, so you have almost a call to action at the end of the book about “finding Jerusalem in our own backyard to travel deeper, not further to break through the crust of the familiar to find the fantastical.” So I think this is really important and you do mention changes in attitude to travel perhaps with climate change and things being a bit different now. So how can we do that though?

How can we travel deeper, not further and see things differently?

Oli: That’s a very good question. I think the way I saw things differently in this book is sort of being in the right place at the right time.

If I kind of give an example of that, I mean, every time I, well, not every time. Because sometimes you take the M4, but a lot of times when you go on holiday to Devon and Cornwall, you drive down the A303 and there’s that horrible sort of choke point near Amesbury and traffic’s crawling really slowly and it’s really annoying. And you look out the window and you’re like, oh, there’s Stonehenge. And you’re like, oh, hi Stonehenge. Then you sort of push on down the road and then you don’t think about it again.

Or you might go there on a school trip or something like that. We might kind of go with your family and walk past the barrier. And you’re like, oh, this is very interesting. I think that had been my attitude to Stonehenge until I started reading about its modern history as a place of gathering at Solstice about the free festivals and visited there on one Summer Solstice event.

And you see that its history for many people is not abstract. That it is a kind of, it is not a heap of old stones. It’s a temple for many people. And the historical sources suggest that people can to a large extent make it what they want it to be. And they do. And the lack of a dogma, the lack of a creed about that place means that you are free to kind of complete the picture yourself.

And I didn’t know, I mean, maybe was a bit too young to know about the free festivals of the seventies. The Battle of the Beanfield where Stonehenge was sort of closed off to the outside world because of the parties that were going on there. And I didn’t realize that it was kind of reinvented, rediscovered as a shrine about 40, 50 years ago and now it’s just sort of ticking along, but you can still get a sense of those people for whom it was a kind of, it was a sort of. They were holy stones.

And that had never crossed my mind until I’d been to some solstice. That I’d read the sources around it. And I think, yeah, that’s part of it. Just learning more, speaking to more people. Waiting until the tourist tour buses have thinned, and when the sun started going down, perhaps, or whatever it might be. Those are often the moments when you start to see a little bit more clearly the magic that some of these places possess and were chosen for in the first instance.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is the Books and Travel podcast.

What are some of the books you recommend about pilgrimage or British travel?

Oli: Okay. Yeah, probably if I was to pick one book about British travel of the last 10 years that kind of opened my eyes a bit more widely. It’s probably not particularly original answer, but probably the The Book of Trespass. I think that’s just a fantastic book that, you know, so much of kind of landscape writing and nature writing is so polite and so deferential and just something that turns that on its head. I really like it. I think it was really fantastic and so much fun. It was a really great book. So I really enjoyed that.

In terms of pilgrimage writing, I really, I’ve not quite finished it yet, but I really enjoyed Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World by Kathryn Hurlock, I think I like it because it’s very kind of clear-eyed and sees through an awful lot of the kind of cloud of mystery around these places to just sort through historical facts. That’s a really fun one.

British kind of landscape books. I mean, I would say probably my, those kind, you know, I think probably every writer has a few kind of holy texts of their own. And probably, again, it’s not hugely original, but for me it’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, which obviously only has like a few pages of England before it starts hightailing over to Spain. But that kind of landscape around the Slad Valley and I guess not very far from you. Really.

Jo: We should say that’s Laurie Lee if people don’t know.

Oli: Yes, of course. That’s another really, that kind of is writing about a place where, you know. It kind of almost jumps out the page at you really, and you feel that you’re there in some ways. I really love that kind of classic British travel writing that came out of the kind of seventies and eighties, those are maybe not quite as fashionable now, the kind of Bruce Chatwin and Patrick Leigh Fermor and all that stuff, but that’s what really kind of inspired me when I was young. And I know that there, there’s a lot of those kind of books are kind of quite flawed in many ways and a lot of stuff is made up.

Jo: Oh, we are all flawed.

Oli: We are all flawed. But yeah, those guys get away with it because they could do it so brilliantly and make it feel so real. But yeah, those books are all hugely important to me. I think you can often tell quite how important a book is by how well thumbed it is. But for me, I’m just looking up on my shelf now and I think the most battered book up there is Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry. That’s like another really kind of sacred text for me. Sorry, I rattled on.

Jo: Oh no. We love books. That’s why we’re here.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Oli: My website is oliversmithtravel.com. And my social media handles are OliSmithTravel on Instagram and Twitter.

Jo: Brilliant. Well thanks so much for your time, Oli. That was great.

Oli: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for reading the book.

The post British Pilgrimage: On This Holy Island With Oliver Smith appeared first on Books And Travel.

Dominating the York skyline, the Minster is more than just a cathedral, it’s a treasure house of English history, art, and culture. From Roman foundations to royal statues and some of the world’s finest medieval stained glass, every stone tells a story. Join me for a virtual tour through this masterpiece of Gothic architecture.

You can find more Gothic Cathedral articles and photos here.

Founded as a timber-and-earth fortress in AD 71, Eboracum was the northern power-base of Rome in Britain. By the 2nd century the Sixth Legion Victrix had rebuilt its walls in stone.

When Emperor Constantius died here in 306, his son Constantine was hailed Augustus on the spot, commemorated by a bronze statue outside York Minster today.

Generations later, the Vikings stormed York in 866, renamed it Jórvík and turned the riverside settlement into the commercial capital of Danelaw, complete with its own coinage and laws.

York cathedral is often called York Minster, from the Old English mynster, itself from Latin monasterium (monastery). In Anglo-Saxon times it described any large church served by a community of clergy who lived communally and acted as a mission base for evangelising the surrounding countryside.

At 148 metres long and more than 75 metres across the transept, York Minster is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe.

The cathedral building began in 1220 and wasn’t considered finished until its reconsecration on 3 July 1472, so the cathedral has layers of 13th to 15th-century architecture. Elements of Gothic architecture include the pointed arches, rib-vaulted ceilings, tall slender columns, flying buttresses, tracery, and the use of light and stained glass to illuminate the cathedral.

I’m not a huge fan of stained glass but I found the Five Sisters Window striking. Five graceful lancets of 13th-century grisaille (grey) glass soar high in the north transept, the world’s largest surviving windows of their type. Since 1925 they’ve also been a national memorial to the women of the British Empire who died in service in the First World War.

Fifteen statues of English kings from William I to Henry VI parade across the 15th-century Quire screen, each crowned and painted against scarlet gold-leafed niches. Many of these screens were destroyed during the Reformation, so this is a rare sight.

You can climb the Tower, but I’m not good with heights, so I didn’t visit that section. The ticket is extra if you want to climb and it’s only allowed at certain times, so check the website.

Completed in 1408, The Great East Window is the largest single expanse of medieval stained glass in Britain, with 311 panels depicting the story of creation to the apocalypse. It’s recently undergone a decade of restoration, so it’s a great time to see it.

The Astronomical Clock, installed in 1955, tracks the stars that guided RAF crews based in Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland during WWII.

Beneath the nave, the Undercroft Museum charts the history of the area from Roman barracks, through Viking times and into the present day. You can also see the 1000 year old York Gospels, one of the few books to survive from before the Norman Conquest (1066) and still used in liturgy today. It was most likely made in Canterbury around 1020 and brought to York by the Bishop Wulfstan.

The Chapter House has no central pillar. I stood in the centre looking up to get this shot.

The crypt lies under the Quire, and you can see down to the foundations of Roman pillars beneath. You can also check out the very cool Doomstone, from the first Norman church on the site. It shows the mouth of Hell and sinners being forced inside by demons.

You can also visit the tomb of St William, the patron saint of York down in the crypt.

York Minster is one of only nine English cathedrals with a permanent stonemasons’ yard. Apprentices learn to carve foliage and grotesques exactly as their medieval forebears did. A brand-new Centre of Excellence, completed in 2024, now welcomes craft trainees from cathedrals worldwide. The Great West Doorway has beautiful sculptures, made as part of the restoration, finished in 1998.

York is a small city, so it’s walkable around the main historic area. I stayed at the Premier Inn, Layerthorpe, which is just opposite one of the entrances to the ancient walls, which you can walk around in different sections.

The walls are the longest and most complete medieval town walls in England, around 3.4 km (2.1 miles), and their line still follows the original Roman fortress on the west side. The cathedral dominates the skyline, so you always know where you are.

York is also famous for The Shambles, narrow medieval streets that inspired Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter films. I recommend visiting early in the day, or in winter, as it gets packed with tourists.

Books about York or set in the city

• Sovereign — CJ Sansom. Part of the Shardlake historical mystery series. England, 1541. The murder of a York glazier involves lawyer Matthew Shardlake in deeper mysteries, connected not only to the prisoner in York castle but to the royal family itself. And when Shardlake and his assistant Barak stumble upon a cache of secret documents which could threaten the Tudor throne, a chain of events unfolds that will lead Shardlake to face the most terrifying fate of the age …
• Murder by the Minster — Helen Cox. Cosy mystery. Librarian Kitt Hartley investigates a murder which threatens a dear friend. She soon discovers that down the quaint streets and snickelways of York lie darker doings than she’d ever dreamed, but she needs to watch her step: the murderer is watching her. And they haven’t finished killing yet …
• Soot — Andrew Martin. York, 1799. A silhouette artist is found murdered in his home — stabbed with a pair of scissors, the tools of his trade. The murderer must be one of the artist’s last sitters, and the people depicted in the final six shades made by him become the key suspects. But who are they? And where are they to be found?
• A History of York in 101 People, Objects and Places — Paul Chrystal. An immersive journey through the city’s hidden stories and surprising secrets. As you stroll along the city’s ancient gates, explore its historic bars, and wander through its charming snickelways, you’ll stumble upon captivating tales that will keep you hooked from start to finish.
• York Minster: A Living Legacy — Keith Jones. An illustrated ‘behind the scenes’ portrait of the York Minster community and its day-to-day life, including first-hand recollections.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this virtual tour of York Minster, and I hope you have a lovely trip if you visit the city yourself.

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I visited in the winter and it was pretty chilly in the cathedral! Well worth the visit.

The cathedral’s ceremonial entrance on the south flank of the nave, begun soon after the abbey became the burial place of King Edward II (1327–30). It is one of England’s earliest fully developed Perpendicular Gothic façades. In the tall niches sit fifteen larger‑than‑life kings of England, from William I to Henry VI. The original 14th‑century figures weathered away; the present limestone replacements were installed in 1877, faithfully copying what medieval fragments survived.

The Norman nave of Gloucester Cathedral, begun soon after the abbey’s foundation in 1089 and structurally complete by about 1130. Its great cylindrical piers, faced in pale Cotswold limestone, carry broad round‑headed arcade arches edged with classic 12th‑century zig‑zag moulding, hallmarks of the Romanesque style. Originally the nave had a timber roof that was destroyed in a fire in 1222. The present stone rib vault gave the Norman walls a new Gothic ceiling without altering the plan below.

Norman columns from the nave. Norman arches are round. Gothic arches are pointed.

The quire, facing the 14th‑century pulpitum (rood‑screen) that marks the boundary with the nave. Sitting on top is the celebrated Harris organ case (1666), among the oldest working organ façades in any English cathedral. The pipes have been renewed many times; the wooden case is original.

The ceiling above the Quire.

I love the lines of a Gothic vaulted ceiling! This looks towards the ceiling above the Quire.

The 15th‑century Lady Chapel was the last major addition to the medieval abbey complex, constructed between about 1457 and 1483, during the high tide of the Perpendicular Gothic style.

Gloucester owns one of England’s largest in‑situ collections of medieval floor tiles. Their mottos, heraldry and plant scrolls give a rare window onto the visual world that medieval worshippers literally walked over. The quarter‑circle fragments once formed large roundels that read Te Deum laudamus (“We praise thee, O God”), the opening of an ancient Latin hymn. They were lifted, catalogued and re‑laid during Project Pilgrim (2017‑18).

This is the 14th century Prentice’s (or Mason’s) Bracket, set high on the east wall of the south transept. Its plan copies a mason’s set‑square, and it might be a memorial to an apprentice who really fell to his death during construction, or it might be a religious allegory.

The shrine of Edward II is at the cathedral but it was blocked off when we visited. The picture below is Wikimedia Commons Credited to Jule955, CC BY-SA 3.0.

While I am not usually a fan of stained glass, I appreciate the aspects of modern art in the cathedral setting.

The blue glass window below occupies the tiny 14th‑century Chapel of St Thomas off the south ambulatory. In 1992 the medieval stone tracery was refilled with a three‑window triptych by contemporary artist Thomas Denny, commissioned for the 900th anniversary of the abbey’s foundation. It shows Doubting Thomas meeting the risen Christ, and elements from Psalm 148, where all the creatures of the earth praise the Lord.

The modern Ivor Gurney Window (installed 2013), honouring the Gloucester‑born poet–composer. It’s one of the two contemporary memorial windows that stained‑glass artist Thomas Denny set into the north chantry of the Lady Chapel in 2013–16. The window sits in a 15th‑century Perpendicular Gothic opening.

Beneath the window (just visible at lower left) lies the alabaster effigy of Bishop Godfrey Goldsborough (1604), a reminder that this small chapel layers 15th‑century masonry, a 17th‑century tomb and 21st‑century glass in the space of a few square metres. Very cool!

There’s more colour in St Andrew’s Chapel, tucked against the east wall of the south transept. It was completely refitted in the Victorian period and is now one of the most colourful spaces in the building. Every inch of the vault and wall‑panelling was covered in 1866‑67 by the Gloucestershire artist‑inventor Thomas Gambier Parry, using his resin‑based “spirit‑fresco” technique.

The Whispering Gallery is a narrow passage that lets two people around 25 metres apart converse in hushed tones thanks to quirky acoustics.

The cloisters, built 1351‑1412, feature the world’s earliest surviving fan‑vaulted ceilings.

We visited in December so it was quite festive. The cloisters have featured in Harry Potter as well as other films.

You need to book a tour to see the Norman crypt dating from 1089–1100.

Beatrix Potter’s Tailor of Gloucester ‘lived’ in a shop next to St Michael’s Gate, the entrance to the lay cemetery of the abbey and also used by pilgrims visiting the shrine of Edward II.

There is a lovely gift shop there where you can buy all things Beatrix Potter.

Books about or set in Gloucester or nearby in the Cotswolds

• The Tailor of Gloucester — Beatrix Potter. A poor tailor tries to survive the winter, struggling to complete a commission for the King, helped by some little mice. Children’s classic.
• Secret Gloucester. Guidebook — Christine Jordan. From fragments of the past that still line Gloucester’s streets to lesser-known facts there is something here to suit anyone’s tastes, such as the sale of wives in the eighteenth century, to hidden Roman ruins. Varying from the momentous to the outlandish, this little book brings together past and present to offer a taste of Gloucester.
• A Cotswold Killing — Rebecca Tope. Nestled in the fertile hills of the Cotswolds, the village of Duntisbourne Abbots is a well-kept secret: beautiful, timeless and quintessentially English. When recently widowed Thea Osborne arrives to house-sit for a local couple, her only fear is that three weeks there might prove a little dull. Her first night’s sleep at Brook View is broken by a piercing scream outside …
• Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death — MC Beaton. Agatha Raisin gives up her successful PR firm, sells her London flat, and settles in for an early retirement in the quiet village of Carsely. But she soon finds her life of leisure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
• A Country Escape — Katie Fforde. Fran has always wanted to be a farmer. And now it looks as if her childhood dream is about to come true. She has just moved to her aunt’s beautiful but very run-down farm in the Cotswolds. If she can turn the place around in a year, the farm will be hers. But Fran knows nothing about farming. She might even be afraid of cows …

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