Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit (Dandy Gilver 11)

Travel Guide

Larnarkshire

Oh those bleak but stunning Larnarkshire moors. Not sure what the moors would look like if you knew people from an asylum had escaped and that the nuns of a local convent were being terrorised.

St Ultan’s convent where the nuns live might be fictional but you get to visualise it and see it for yourself very clearly here and feel their fear when the moors and the land seems to engulf them. The landscape is nice in parts but unforgiving in others:

“A mine had been dug – we passed its locked gates with their faded warning signs. Timber had been grown – we drove along a black tunnel through a line plantation.”

“The land won hands down. the pale stone buildings, the mind gates, the black quarry scars, the inkblots of trees , were all such tiny patches and the moor was so very nearly endless, a sea of dun-coloured winter grass, rippled by the wind sweeping down from where the hills lay in quiet folds in the far distance”

The setting in the convent allows you to explore in quiet serenity the moors and what they might feel to live there in quiet contemplation. Imagine a place that can change character in an instant and have nuns and those with mental illness living in close proximity in a harsh environment.

One line says it all:

“The kind of evil I was about to delve into on Larnark Moor came from cold inhumanity and made one too bleak and hopeless even to weep”