Book Review - sort of.

I have just finished reading The Denniston Rose by Jenny Patrick.
And about to start the sequel Heart of Coal. I'm not sure what
took me so long to get round to these two books. Not that it was
anything like I expected. It was a good story though and you
could just about taste the fog and coal dust and visualise life as it
was in what must have been a hellhole - Denniston in the 1880s.

The photos were taken on a bright and sunny day in 2000. But it is an eerie sort of place, perched up on the plateau, an area of abandoned machinery, chimneys to indicate where the houses once stood, and coal underfoot. You can stand at the top and look down the incline, scarily steep, and imagine people riding in coal wagons when it was the only way in and out of Denniston.

I don't have photos of the first visit I had to Denniston. In the early 80s a friend bought a house there - for peanuts - and a group of us spent the weekend there. It was winter, the house - an old villa in need of a heap of work - was drafty, cold, and creaked ominously. A fog settled in and you could taste the coaldust (a memory of the feel of it on my tongue emerged while I was reading the book) I had a feeling that it wasn't safe to go out into it, that 'something' might be lurking to grab hapless and unwary explorers.

Anyway it's not a bad book, I enjoyed it. It's sort of added to that guarded affection I have for Denniston, and the respect I have for people that lived and worked there.