Although I did not come to live in England until
1971, my earliest memories of this green and pleasant land date back as far as
the autumn/winter of 1963. I have been
in love with the English countryside ever since, and it is a love affair which
is consummated every time that I leave my little house deep in the heart of
rural North Devon. It is a love affair
which is completely requited, and which has given me immense happiness over the
past half-century.
The late Malcolm Saville, a children’s
author whose reputation is nowhere as near as high as I believe that it ought
to be in these degenerate times, once said that – and I paraphrase – the reason
why he set so many of the his novels for children and young people in wild and
beautiful parts of the British Isles, was to encourage his readers to visit
places that he loved. In a funny sort of
way, I am now in a position of being able to do the same thing (well sort of).
Many of the novels in our Fortean Fiction
range, most notably those by Tabitca Cope and Di Francis, are set in
spectacularly beautiful parts of our islands, and it is with great pleasure
that they have taken a figurative leaf out of Malcolm Saville’s books. These
novels are illustrated with general landscape views of the areas described in
the book, and I hope that the mixture of the author’s skill and the photography
of Dave Curtis (Dark Wear), my lovely
wife Corinna (Death on Dartmoor) and
yours truly (Dark Ness), will
encourage the more adventurous reader to seek out and enjoy these beautiful
landscapes for themselves.
This is a practice with which I intend to
carry on for as long as possible. As a society we are becoming more and more
divorced from the reality of the natural world and it is one of the most
important parts of the CFZ Publishing Group to try, in our own little way, to
help redress this balance.
Hiroshi Yagi was 19 when he first heard a strange howling in a beech wood
forest on Mount Naeba. He knew then that it was no ordinary dog. With heightened
curiosity, he later began a what-would-be 40-year search for an animal that has
not been seen in Japan since 1905. Since then, Yagi has transferred from one job
to another, assembled sophisticated monitoring equipment and climbed and trekked
mountains in hopes of finding this creature called the Japanese wolf.
In an article for the first edition of Cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that cryptozoology is the study of 'unexpected animals' and following on from that perfectly reasonable assertion, it seems to us that - whereas the study of out of place birds may not have the glamour of the hunt for bigfoot, or lake monsters - it is still a perfectly valid area for the Fortean Zoologist to be interested in. So, after about six months of regular postings on the main bloggo, Corinna has taken the plunge and started a 'Watcher of the Skies' blog of her own as part of the CFZ Bloggo Network.
