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1674: Scarcross Hall is where the secrets they hide, but if you go looking, who knows what you’ll find…
The Coffin Path
What you need to know before your trail
1674: Mercy Booth has lived at Scarcross, the old hall just off the coffin path, for all her life. The moors and the house are in her blood – and her soul.
Ellis Ferreby is a mysterious, unpredictable outsider who arrives there unexpectedly and finds himself increasingly drawn into her world.
But the house holds a tainted history. And the moor top hides something far darker..
Travel Guide
Scarcross Hall, Yorkshire Moors
A fictional setting in a very creepy gothic house, farmland and fields which stretch for miles and miles. Katherine Clements says that Oakwell Hall is the inspiration for Scarcross Hall
It’s a cold and unforgiving place. The landscape is bleak, dark and damp. The animals which wander on the farm, are often found dead, or dying in birth. If the weather doesn’t kill them, a predator will. The stench of death is all around – bloody, metallic stench you can taste on your lips
“To either side, the land rise steeply up the valley walls, Silver water carves a thousand -year path between peat and rock, dropping from the fells, freezing into icicles, glazing the mosses and hazing into fine mist where it meets the valley bottom. The music of the falls is as familiar as my own breath. It’s a place I’ve known my whole life, a playmate in childhood, a sanctuary now I’ve grown and many things between”
Throughout the novel the landscape is the main character as well as the coins which foresee death. The community is small and isolated so strangers are unwelcome and unwelcome. Shivers in the trees mean someone is there, or is it a ghost from the past?
There is talk of the Coffin Path where bodies are transported, but the stench of death is very clearly centered on Scarcross Hill where the old house sits as it has done for centuries. A house sitting on secrets and ones people will die for…..
Trail Gallery
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
This is seriously creepy! Whoah, the setting might be fictional but it’s clearly set on the Yorkshire Moors so already you have the wild moors, the biting winds and the deadly winters. The sheep which die giving birth, the babies ripped from their wombs, the savagery of life here is evident, and the weather is bleak, but on dear me, how it chills to the bone!
This was a thrilling chilling story with the mystery of the three coins which could foresee death. Warnings in old rural communities depended on superstition but there seems more to things than that here. I loved the story of Mercy – great name for this character – and her world of fear and darkness.
The novel reads like a ghost story but events take place after the English Civil war so that is the major ghost in the story. Haunted men, haunted villagers and ghosts all around. What or who is walking around those hills and in the shadows
An eerie setting to go with the brilliantly eerie tale. You just know when a stranger walks or rather appears in the village, things aren’t going to go well. There’s a rumour of an evil presence around these parts and that is omnipresent from the very first page. There’s a thin line between life and death and it’s a taunt tightrope for all. The sheep in the novel fare even worse.
Mercy narrates for the most part, but Ellis provides the secrets of the past. Nicely claustrophobic – beware of wind tapping at the window and if you’re in a room with a fireguard Arrrrrgh!
Creepy to the extreme but a finely taunt chiller.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Coffin Path
Destination: Yorkshire Moors Author/Guide: Katherine Clements Departure Time: 1647
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