THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

There was an old woman who lived in a small stone shack amid the wilderness of the Fryup coal holes, a place rendered almost impenetrable through summer by the sky-high bracken, and in winter by its treacherous, snow-filled ravines.  No-one knew the woman’s name, only that she had lived there for all of her ninety-nine years, without electricity or running water.  Seldom in all those years had she left the high moors to venture even as far as Fryup itself.  Once, when a prospective documentary maker battled his way through the boulders and bracken to find her, he was warned off by the rabid barking of the woman’s dogs, and the sight of a 12-bore shotgun sticking out of one of the shack’s small windows.

unpub