Folk law is full of places that don’t entirely exist. Places that slide off the map, and give cartographers a headache.

There is a simple explanation for this, the world is a globe, maps are square. If you have ever tried to wrap a football in Christmas present paper, apart form this clearly being an act of madness on your part, you will under stand that the only way to get a flat map to fit around a globe like surface is to fold the map over on itself in many strange ways. Cartographers these days try to draw their maps to fit the globe, because Global Positioning Satellites can now tell them where everything is. Because of this they have to stretch some places on the maps to cover bits where they have to fold the map to get it over the globe.

This is why that odd snicket between streets isn’t in the A to Z, That grove of trees over yonder that should be a narrow line seems like an oddly ancient wood when you walk into to it. That small hill that looks like it might be a barrow mound does’t appear to be on the ordinance survey map. Some places aren’t on the maps, some places are the folds that allow the maps to fit around the world. The places in the creases. the places where cartographers of old, not bound by the rules of modern cartography, simply wrote the words, ‘here be dragons’.

And of course, sometimes, if you wander, and of course wonder, you can get lost in those folds.

Make Believe: Hexford Witches book 1 by CB Hallam

So anyway, welcome to Hexford, a small village in the Yorkshire dales, that resides in the folds of a cartographers map. A village looked over by the resident of a cottage named for the brook that flows past it Kallin Beck. Dinah Nye spends most of her time in her cottage kitchen making scones, which is a special kind of magic all of its own. She however also a witch, and her cottage has been the witches cottage for generations of Kallin Beck witches.

But something is wrong in Hexford, residents are having bad dreams they can’t quitter remember when they awaken. Something is returning, something dark, something dangerous. Something that may require more than just scones baked with love and a witches ‘knack’ to defeat.

And the cottage isn’t entirely happy either.

Hallam has a gift for creating characters with edges that you want to learn more about. He also has a gift for telling stories with atmosphere that draw you in to them and make you want to know what happens next. These are the hallmarks of a good writer, the hallmarks of a great writer is to do so in a fashion that seems effortless and this is what he does.

A notes on scones, My Auntie Alene made the best scones know to mankind, a diminutive Yorkshire woman who understood the magic of the mixing bowl if anyone ever did. She has long since left these lands for the strange places beyond our ken (her and my uncle Dennis moved to Oxfordshire to live at the bottom of a country vets garden*) Thus her scones have long since departed the pennies. The Pennies are a darker place for there absence.

*The country vet in question being my cousin Andrew, and the bottom of the garden being the separate little flat over the garage

Anyway I am off to try and make a map of Teesside fit around a scale curve of the earth, I think there is a fold near my house, which if there is would explain a lot about the residents of port Clarence.

I may also need to bake some scones.