It’s an extraordinary privilege being the Archaeologist for the Stonehenge & Avebury World Heritage Site. For me spending my days working in the ancient heart of Wiltshire really is like being the proverbial kid in a sweet shop. The whole county is soaked in the ancient past, and nowhere more so than the Marlborough Downs which form the backdrop for much of my debut novel The Hidden Bones. It’s a landscape littered with burial mounds and spectacular prehistoric monuments, you can barely move without tripping over one.
But it’s also a chalkland landscape, and one of its curiosities is that here and there ancient springs bubble up to the surface spilling out their life-giving waters. There’s no more beautiful sight than the glistening waters of a chalkland stream (or a bourne as they’re called in these parts) meandering their way through the hills and valleys on an early summer’s day. But the bournes can be capricious beasts. Some of them, predictably known as winterbounes, rise only in the winter and just a few only show themselves very occasionally in the wettest of winters.
