As some of you may already know, my new book Adelaide\u2019s Orphans<\/em> made the short list of the Word Alive Press writing contest in 2014.\u00a0 Sheep Among Wolves is preparing it for publication, if the Lord is willing, this spring or summer.\u00a0 Over the next few months, I\u2019m looking forward to giving you some glimpses behind the scenes of the creation of Adelaide\u2019s Orphans.<\/em><\/p>\n

While the setting of this book has been adapted for fiction, most of its features were inspired by real-life places.\u00a0 In 2011 I had the blessing of being able to visit Northumberland, and experience England\u2019s rugged borderland for myself.<\/p>\n

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Housey Crags, which inspired the opening scene of Adelaide\u2019s Orphans,<\/em> turned out to be one of the most enjoyable outings of my trip.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t been particularly looking forward to it beforehand, because hiking is not really something I love, and the crag was the central feature in a walking tour.\u00a0 Certainly the excursion did include hiking.\u00a0 We parked in a valley of the magnificent Cheviot Hills, crossed the winding road we had just turned off, and began climbing up.<\/p>\n

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One of the most delightful things about walking in England is that the paths run right through private property\u2014in this case, through sheep fields.\u00a0 Instead of just looking at the meadows from the other side of a fence, you walk right through them.\u00a0 The sheep are there, but in general they seem quite used to visitors and go on with their own occupations.<\/p>\n

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We get over a stile and into another field.\u00a0 By now we are beginning to feel how high we are above the valley.\u00a0 The clump of woods, with its little stream, is far beneath us. \u00a0Our van looks like a toy car in its little square of pavement.\u00a0 We are in the real Northumberland hill scenery now.\u00a0 The wind-tousled heights stretch out all around us, and we are now approaching our goal.<\/p>\n

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How shall I describe Housey Crags up close?\u00a0 I have already tried to do it once for the book, but I fancy a great deal of ink might be expended without giving a real sense of what this remarkable geographic feature is like.\u00a0 Fortunately, the photographs can supplement my words here.<\/p>\n

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Housey Crags are a great mound of rock, sticking up from the top of the hill, wonderfully chiselled in lines, which make one think of the Flood, which I presume created them.\u00a0 They do not give one the impression of having been made by man.\u00a0 It is delightful rock to climb; all little steps and good footholds, constant inequalities, and no sharp edges.\u00a0 In fact, the greatest danger is from the wind, which seems to be doing its best to blow us off our vantage point.\u00a0 As you can see in the picture, the top of the rock is really a lot higher up than the rest of the hillside, so that one feels as if it would be very easy to blow away.<\/p>\n

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But what is this concern by the side of the exhilaration of reaching the summit?\u00a0 Beneath us, stretches all around the rising, falling, rolling landscape of the Cheviot Hills.\u00a0 Down at the bottom of the crag we can see the rest of our party, giving us a sense of how high up we really are.\u00a0 We cling to the rock, our jackets flapping violently and our hair blowing in our eyes, but for all that, there is a sense of stillness to the world around us.\u00a0 We<\/em> are moving, scrambling, struggling to stay upright in the mighty wind which sweeps along the hills, but below, all is motionless.\u00a0 There is scarcely a trace of humanity in sight.\u00a0 And the sheep, the gorse, the silent road far down in the fold of the valley, seem all to embody the changelessness of these wild hills.<\/p>\n

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Housey Crags today are exactly the same as they were when Adelaide played there in the 1850s.\u00a0 The view she looked out upon is unaltered by the century and a half which have passed. \u00a0It is unchanged from what it was three hundred, or five hundred, or perhaps even a thousand years before that.\u00a0 The pastures have probably altered a little.\u00a0 There are different sheep in them, of course, and I suppose the stiles have been built, or replaced, in comparatively recent times.\u00a0 But the crag has stayed the same.\u00a0 It has remained a huge, silent monument on the crest of the rolling hills\u2014most likely since the day that God declared \u201cneither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.\u201d\u00a0 (Gen. 9:11)<\/p>\n

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And that changelessness, the immovability of a rock which has withstood for millennia the winds which nearly swept us off\u2014the grandeur of the massive stone outcrop, the magnitude of the Godhead of which the Rock that is Higher (Ps. 61:2) is but a type\u2014the magnificence of this scene, untouched by the changing hand of man, surely that is one of the greatest charms of the landscape in which Adelaide\u2019s Orphans<\/em> had it’s birth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As some of you may already know, my new book Adelaide\u2019s Orphans made the short list of the Word Alive Press writing contest in 2014.\u00a0 Sheep Among Wolves is preparing… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adelaides-orphans"],"yoast_head":"\n