BEHIND THE CURSE
BEHIND THE CURSE
THE FEDWEN FAWR SCRAPBOOK
A few years ago, my elderly father asked for my help in
understanding an odd answerphone message. The line was breaking up and the
caller had an extremely strong Welsh accent. Neither of us could work out what
he was saying apart from the phone number given at the end. I called it and
discovered the message was not for my Dad, it was for my late mother. It turned
out that a distant cousin had recently died at his farm in the Welsh hills.
They could find no record of any relative at all except her - or now, as it
turned out, me.
I made the journey down and discovered a lonely farmhouse in an extraordinary state of dilapidation – bare floorboards, gaping holes in the ceiling, rubbish piled in every room, furniture and fittings unchanged since the 1950s. It was impossible not to speculate about the kind of person who had lived there, the kind of things that might have happened.
The experience warped and twisted in my imagination until it finally emerged as The Curse of Fedwen Fawr. But rather than go into any more detail about the genesis of the story, I thought it might be more interesting to share a few images from that day, many of which somehow found their way into the story.
I made the journey down and discovered a lonely farmhouse in an extraordinary state of dilapidation – bare floorboards, gaping holes in the ceiling, rubbish piled in every room, furniture and fittings unchanged since the 1950s. It was impossible not to speculate about the kind of person who had lived there, the kind of things that might have happened.
The experience warped and twisted in my imagination until it finally emerged as The Curse of Fedwen Fawr. But rather than go into any more detail about the genesis of the story, I thought it might be more interesting to share a few images from that day, many of which somehow found their way into the story.
