THE GHOST AT KINGSLAND RECTORY...

The VV often visits the village of Kingsland in Herefordshire. Some of her family still live there, and she spent many happy childhood days wandering past the black-and-white houses, the Georgian residences, and later Victorian red brick homes with front gardens and black iron railings dividing front paths from the pavements.

The house pictured above on the left, with its ivy-smothered walls, was once the village rectory. The VV has never been inside and these days it is privately owned. But, it has always held an allure, and now takes on a life of its own in the story, Elijah's Mermaid, the VV's second Victorian novel.

At the side of the house is a public walkway leading to a path through a meadow. Beyond a 'kissing gate' you will enter the village church yard - presumably the very route the local rectors would have used.

However, if you turn right at the house's back garden boundary, rather than heading across the field, you may find a little stream all but hidden by shrubs and low branches of trees that form a natural barrier between that and some pasture land.

The VV has always been drawn to that stream, and in Elijah's Mermaid, she re-imagined it as larger  - a place where two orphaned children who are living with their grandfather love to spend their days in play and where – after reading The Water Babies written by Charles Kingsley – they also try to catch such a creature by dipping jam jars in the water.

Woman by a stream, from The London Illustrated News, 1875 

No real water babies have been caught, but in the local village lore there is talk of something sinister inhabiting the water - a story that tells how, on still dark nights, the cries of a wailing child are heard.

The origin of the 'haunting' is said to stem back to the time when a  rector lived in the house with only his daughter for company. The local gossips would have it that the girl appeared to be with child, with all manner of different rumours as to who the father might be. However, no child was ever seen and the wagging tongues were stilled - until the night when a poacher was walking along the banks of the stream and heard the cries of a newborn baby. On further investigation, he was shocked to have discovered a tiny corpse in lying in the water.

In the tradition of these things, it is still said to this very day that if you walk past the stream at night you might also hear the cries. The cries of the little child who was either born or concealed in the water, or abandoned there to drown. 

And now, in Elijah's Mermaid, the VV makes her own allusion to this tragic tale. But, hopefully, there's no real ghost who still cries out at dead of night.