"Once upon a time...there was the Weald. Much of the Weald was smoke
and flame - a place of blast furnaces and molten iron - and the mine
pits; still, deep, dark cooling pools, from which would come the hiss of
steam when white hot iron was plunged in.
And scattered throughout the Wealden forest there were those charcoal
burners' enclosures - the hut and the kiln, the piles of cut limbs and
branches, and the solitary, wrinkled charcoal burner.
And when the charcoal burner died, as often as not his body rotted away
in solitude and there was no-one to miss him, as the forest retook the
enclosure - and the hut and the kiln subsided back into the ground.
Sometimes bits of body were collected - no-one knew by whom.
Someone dark. Someone with a book. Bits of body were fixed together -
bits of this, that and the other. Higgledy piggledy wiggledy. A brain
animated by a spark of fire from a bloomer - an ancient blast furnace; a
clay chimney - or fluxed into awareness and motion by an organism
usually associated with rot and decay - the body jerked into some sort
of life..."
Here begins the story of Link, a cryptid, a knitted-together Piltdown
Man, whose pilgrimage takes him up the South Downs, staggering along the
A27 and the M27, through Southampton, through Amesbury, past Porton
Down, to Glastonbury, Dartmoor, the west of Cornwall and Brittany.
Mike O'Leary has been a professional storyteller for 25 years and his
post-fairy tale vividly knits together the knuckers, hags, wisht hounds
and dragons of folklore with more contemporary concerns of roadkill,
hitch-hiking, migration and abuse. The result is a very adult story that
investigates the whole idea of story in our lives and in our search for
meaning.
