In my previous life as a Primary School teacher, I always put great value on the reading of stories to the whole class and would choose them carefully. One story on which I took a risk was, “A Stranger Came Ashore” by Mollie Hunter. It was a risk because it isn’t funny, it isn’t in the modern day and it is set in the Shetlands – an environment totally alien to the children I taught; the school is in the middle of a tough, inner-city housing estate. However, the story is so beautifully written that it is able to transport the children into another world and it was the only story I haver ever read, in over thirty years of teaching, where the class involuntarily clapped the ending, smiles all over their faces.

I have decided to take various sections of the story and try to represent them in print. To me, the themes of Old Magick and the supernatural, are very much in keeping with the majority of my artistic output. This first image is of the small, fictional village of Blackness where the story begins and where it is mostly set.