Ghost Lake Rising - Notes from Paleolake Flixton

Twelve weeks to publication day for The Ghost Lake

Twelve weeks today I will be sitting here, tingling with nervous energy, waiting for the official launch of my nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake. Weirdly, I’ll have already done my first reading, which I’ll tell you about when all the other dates are diarised and I can link to it, but this will be the actual day that the book launches.

I’m told that some people find it a slight anti climax: nothing actually happens, a secret door doesn’t suddenly open and release your books like flying monkeys into the world. It’s just that there has to be A DAY when it is official.

15th August is that day.

The really exciting thing right now is that it is available to pre order:

What is The Ghost Lake of the title?

The ‘ghost lake’ is Paleolake Flixton, an extinct lake in North Yorkshire which was created by glacial movement. Inhabitation of this lake goes back thousands of years, with internationally important archaeological discoveries at sites around its shores. The lake has gradually soaked away into the earth, leaving only a watermark, a ghost of itself. 

(Picture courtesy of Journal of World History)

My life has been spent navigating the edges of the lake, growing up, going to school, my first jobs, my terrible relationships, my good marriage, the walking to cope with intense grief, have all happened around this lake; a place that is there and not there.

I think of myself as a lake person, connected to the people that came before me by landscape, if not genes. The people that came before me were the mesolithic people of Star Carr, the medieval nuns at Carman’s spittle; people who gave refuge from wolves to travellers coming down through the thick forests of the Yorkshire Wolds. My lake people kin were the people who farmed the fenland, the people who stripped that land away, the servants and maids, people whose voices are barely recorded because they were the working classes, and they were the other mothers who’d experienced loss, the war bereaved, the women dealing with infant mortality. My lake people kin were the neolithic people who had buried their child with the Folkton drums. They were the people who scraped and scratched, and the people that lived the land. We had something in common, and it was this landscape I stood on, am standing on. They too stood in the scent of cow parsley in May, they too watched the swifts return, skimming down the valley, they too were dusted with blackthorn blossom, they too walked over the ridge of the valley, they stand where I stand.

As I write this I have the window in my office open. It has been raining. The air smells of earth and water, a faint scent of cow parsley. The swifts, recently returned, are zipping past my window. And as i write this blog I am writing myself into the story of the lake.

Here I am, at the edge of the lake, looking down it to the present and the past, myself a thin layer of experience over the experiences of all those people who came before me.

Here I am.

Pre orders make a huge difference to how a book is received. Not everyone has got the money to pre order, but if you were thinking about it, it does make a lovely gift to yourself.

Either way, thank you for joining me on my journey, and for reading my posts here, and for all the kind thoughts and messages you’ve already sent. Without you I couldn’t give myself time to write. This place, substack, genuinely feels like a writer and reader community, a safe place to come and nest up. I have you to thank for that feeling.

Until next time

x