The ‘Chicken Sheep’ and that award-winning photo …

You have Maureen W in Florida, USA, to thank for giving me the idea to make this Behind The Books page.
Maureen shared her thoughts in my Voracious Readers Facebook group about a passage in Ties that Bond in Gretna Green that led her down a rabbit hole looking at photos of the Scottish Lowlands.

If you’re already a member of my Voracious Readers, you can click on the screenshot above to go directly to Maureen’s post.

Here’s a quick reminder

I’ve carefully avoided spoilers in case you haven’t reached book 3 yet.

Page 588. Ties that Bond in Gretna Green
Kindle 96%

The other half was draped in an increasingly dense mist as your eye travelled across the photo, where gloomy clouds provided ominous shadows. It was evocative, clever, and made me shiver. “Wow!”

Dola said, “He called this one Janus: The Two Faces of the Scottish Lowlands. It took the gold medal.”

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So it’s true?

Yes, and not really. Ross is a character, a photographer in Ties that Bind in Gretna Green. But the idea for his fictional, award-winning photo came from something real.

There’s a small, unnamed lane through the fields around Gretna Green. Niki and Tilly walk down it several times in the books, beginning in book one. The first time is the day of her visit to the local shop where she meets Betty and buys bridies.

But it is a real lane, and before we moved house, I walked Lucy (my real Bichon) down that lane pretty much every dry day for over eleven years. (Because Bichons don’t like ‘wet’)

Sometime in 2021, I began a silly project with an app called 1 Second Everyday or 1SE. It’s free if you want to try it yourselves. Find it in your app store. The idea is that you take a photo every day, and at the end of the year the app makes a movie of your 365 seconds. Or in my case about 95 seconds because there were a LOT of wet days that year and I didn’t walk her some days. (Lucy got her walks, but my partner didn’t know about the app.)

I thought it would be fun to take photos from the entrance to a local farmer’s field. That field is known in our family as the “Chicken Sheep field.” To differentiate it from the hundreds of other fields around Gretna Green.

Why? Because when Lucy was a puppy, it held chickens.
One day when we walked past it, it was full of sheep instead.
I always joked that Lucy was secretly convinced that those chickens grew up to be sheep and maybe she would one day. I mean, small white and fluffy to large white and fluffy isn’t such a stretch, is it?

Lucy always insisted on pausing there. In that way that dogs do, she sniffed the exact same patch of grass she sniffs every other day of the year. So I knew I’d always have time to take a quick snap. 

So I did just that. When I watched it back, the oft-changing light and seasons made me smile. When I was writing Ties, I think visions of that field were playing in my mind while I wrote about Ross.

You can watch it if you like. It’s less than two minutes, one field, a couple of views of Gretna Green and the piper, and a couple of Lucy along with two book covers on the days the first two books were published 📚 (2021 was a busy year!)

Sound warning: if you’re at work. There’s a lot of Baa-ing, some Scottish wind noise and some bagpipes on the soundtrack. (Can you see Niki shuddering from here?)

Oh, and P.S. The photos that look like they were taken in the dead of night were probably about five p.m. in Scotland. Remember, some days we’re lucky to get seven hours of daylight.

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It can’t just be me?

Do you have a place local to you that has a name only your friends and family know?
Please let me know in the comments. I KNOW everyone always says that—but I mean it, and I read and reply to almost all comments on these Behind the Books posts 😀

Want more Behind the Books?

This is only a single part of the Behind the Books series. It has lots of new stuff on it. You can find the main index page here