Why a Booktrail?
1856: Loch Katrine waterworks. A Highland wilderness fast becoming an industrial wasteland. No place for a lady.
The Ninth Child
What you need to know before your trail
Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor to an extraordinary waterworks being built miles from the city. But Isabel, denied the motherhood role that is expected of her by a succession of miscarriages, finds unexpected consolations in a place where she can feel the presence of her unborn children and begin to work out what her life in Victorian society is for.
The hills echo with the gunpowder blasts of hundreds of navvies tunnelling day and night to bring clean water to diseased Glasgow thirty miles away – digging so deep that there are those who worry they are disturbing the land of faery itself. Here, just inside the Highland line, the membrane between the modern world and the ancient unseen places is very thin.
With new life quickening within her again, Isabel can only wait. But a darker presence has also emerged from the gunpowder smoke. And he is waiting too.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Travel back in time BookTrail style to the building of the Loch Katrine to the Milngavie Reservoir waterway
Loch Katrine to the Milngavie Reservoir
This novel is both inspired and based on the very real aqueduct system which was built from Loch Katrine to the Milngavie Reservoir to supply the City of Glasgow with fresh drinking water. This was an idea and feat ahead of its time as cholera and other diseases were rife at the time.
Queen Victoria opened up the aqueduct in 1859 and it’s been supplying water to the city of Glasgow ever since. The book looks at the men and women who built this feat of engineering. How they struggled and persevered to have such an important source of water for the people.
Doon Hill
Doon Hill in Aberfoyle is very much still a place of fairy lore and superstition today. This is where Robert Kirke in the book ‘goes to faery’. Today, people tie ribbons and other markers to the trees and sit and think about the folklore that might surround this place.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: The Ninth Child
Destination: Scottish Highlands, Glasgow Authour/guide: Sally Magnusson Departure Time: 1856
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