Curious about what’s behind Old as the Hills? Explore my author notes about the historical details behind the book.
These notes do contain some plot spoilers! Otherwise, they’re as shared at the end of the book, with edits only to share the most useful links and cleaning up some formatting for the web. Posted April 2026.
Thank you so much for joining me on the first half of this particular journey with Gabe and Rathna.
I know this book leaves you on more of an unanswered question than I usually do. You can get Upon A Summer’s Day where you get your books. My great thanks to my editor, Kiya Nicoll, to all my early readers, and all the people who let me talk their ear off about this one.
This book is also new in another way. It’s far more tied into specific real-world events than I have done in the past, and so this author’s note is going to be on the longer side. I want to share my sources, and let you know which bits are historical, which are part of the historical record (but sometimes from some unreliable narrators or sources), and generally take a dive into esoteric history of the period.
Let’s start with everything that isn’t about witchcraft, ritual, and various esoteric and occult groups.
If you’re curious about Geoffrey, Alexander, and the Heinrichs, there is more of interest in Best Foot Forward.
Chapter 1 : One of the challenges of any book anchored in history is figuring out not just what happened, but what people knew at the time about what was going on. In the first chapter, Ferdinand mentions a recent white paper from the British government that made it clear they had some understanding of the Nazi treatment of concentration camp prisoners. Rathna, with her long-term connections to the Jewish community, was certainly aware of it (and Ferdinand was due to his mother’s background.) I’ve used antisemitism here as the modern preferred spelling, which was also in use at the time.
Chapter 7 : White feathers were given to shame young men who were not in uniform, both during the Great War and some during the Second World War. There are some reports of women deliberately forming groups of the kind in this chapter, though mostly informal (and often ill-considered, since as Rathna points out, there were a number of reasons someone might not be in uniform.)
Unlike the Great War, there was an explicit list of reserved occupations in the Second World War. This was meant to make sure that people with specific key skills were not sent off as infantry or some other purpose that wasted their skills and training. Reserved occupations included teaching, a number of skilled trades, and key industries to keep the country going.
Chapter 12 : The Naked Man, as Gabe notes, is in fact a tree. In more recent years, it’s suffered from weather and some vandalism, and there is barely a stump left. In the 1940s, it was a notable landmark in the New Forest. It was also quite close to Brockhurst, which was a significant centre for Army placements during the War, including possibly some radio signalling intended to mislead the enemy. (You may imagine our unnamed party in this scene as from that unit.)
Chapter 16 : The weather throughout is as accurate as I can make it, which in this period is “quite”, thanks to the archived and digitised daily records of the Met Office. Late April into May was exceptionally cold in many parts of the UK.
Chapter 18 : There were discussions in progress about forming something like the Home Guard from 1939 into early 1940. It was not officially formed until May 14th, until after the invasion of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Chapter 24 : The evacuation at Dunkirk was pretty much as described in this chapter – absolutely a miracle of getting many people out of there, many on tiny fishing vessels and other small ships pressed into service. They did have to zig-zag quite some extra distance due to mines and other threats in the Channel. Dover was a key coordination point, both for its location and its existing infrastructure.
Chapter 29 and 31 : The caves Rathna and the others visit are largely real, with an addition where she meets Urdin. They’re known as the Grotto de Pape, the artwork in the main caves is as described in the chapter. I was quite taken with a carved image from these caves, known as the Venus of Brassempouy, a woman with a net over her hair, who Urdin rather resembles.
Chapter 34 : “Six impossible things before breakfast” is indeed an Alice in Wonderland quote. (It’s said by the Queen of Hearts.)
Chapter 37 : There was in fact a campaign with the tag line “Be Like Dad, Keep Mum” in this period. I couldn’t find a more precise date than 1940, so I may have taken a liberty with this showing up a few months early. It was just too perfect (in that “awful propaganda phrasing” sense) not to use.
Chapter 42 : The last day of this book is August 12th. August 13th is known as Adlertag, when a series of more intense bombing raids began. These ramped up rapidly toward the Blitz, which is generally dated as beginning in September 1940.
Now that we’ve got through the other history, you might want a cup of tea (or your drink of choice) as we dive into the esoteric history. There’s quite a lot here to explore. I did my best to tread lightly with historical figures, but I do want to share my sources and how I handled some details.
The late 1800s and early 1900s saw a huge surge in interest in a variety of esoteric and occult topics, as well as an interest in folklore and mythology. Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon gives a good overview of many of the different threads of this period. A number of people came together, formed groups, schismed, formed new groups, and tried a wide range of things.
For some of the (brief) details that Gabe and others discuss at various points about magic in Germany, I drew on Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. It discusses a number of the changes in attitude around various esoteric topics, the different strands (exemplified in part by the varying interests of the Heinrichs), and the way fields like astrology were treated at different points. As well as, of course, a wide range of upsetting biases and actions based on them.
Some of this information was widely shared. The comments from the Society of Inner Light are taken from the collection of letters written by Dion Fortune and collected in a volume edited by Gareth Knight, The Magical Battle of Britain: The War Letters of Dion Fortune. These letters (as noted below) were circulated starting at the beginning of the Second World War.
I’d already been familiar with a fair bit of this history when I started the research for this book, but I needed to dig into a lot of details to make sure the names, dates, and known or documented information lined up with (or at least didn’t conflict with) the events of the book. As I kept joking while I was writing, it appears that you couldn’t walk through the New Forest in the period without tripping over an esoteric group of some kind. And not just the ones people who’ve done some reading about this period have heard of, either!
I was hoping that I’d be able to bring my plot to intersect with a particular event. That would be the Lammas night working to keep Hitler on the other side of the Channel (purportedly) done by a coven of witches in the New Forest in August 1940.
I’ve been intrigued by this bit of lore since reading Katherine Kurtz’s Lammas Night at an impressionable age and fairly regularly since. She’s mostly dealing with a different line of ritual and magic, much of which does not apply in my Albion. However, there are a lot of ways in which Old As The Hills is very much in conversation with her book about the nature of sacrifice, what it means, and what it is good for.
For details around the New Forest coven, I relied heavily on two books: Michael Howard’s Modern Wicca: A History From Gerald Gardner to the Present, published in 2010. Howard was the longtime editor of a significant British magical magazine (The Cauldron), and knew many of the people he was writing about. The other key book was Philip Heselton’s In Search of the New Forest Coven which came out in 2020. It explores the possible members and origin of the New Forest coven in a great deal of detail.
This group was, to the degree we know about it, made up mostly of middle class, educated, older adults. While most of the names are guesswork to some degree (due to privacy and secrecy considerations), we can make some suppositions about some of them. Several were actively involved in known esoteric groups in the general area, such as the Rosicrucian Theatre based in Christchurch, on the Hampshire coast immediately south of the New Forest.
The complication, of course, is that some people are unreliable narrators. Much of what we have about this event and direct reports of the group comes from Gerald Gardner, founder of modern Wicca. He commented in several places, years later, that he was part of that ritual and coven. The problem is that some of the information Gardner gives is contradictory, some doesn’t fit in other ways, and a lot of it is really rather vague.
After I took quite a lot of notes from various sources, I was left with some commentary about what the ritual involved, that there were 17 people there (possibly), and a lot of vagueness. As an author, this is actually quite helpful. While various sources have suggested lists of who was involved, there’s only substantial overlap for about 10 of them. This made inserting Gabe and Isobel as participants a lot more feasible.
Chapter 3 and 10 : As noted above, Dion Fortune and the Society of Inner Light circulated regular letters among members of the organisation. Some people met at the building in London that the Society used, but other members around the country would join in the shared meditation at the same time. The idea was to build that focus with particular goals and intentions. Gareth Knight’s collection usefully includes notes on ongoing events of the war as linked
The Wild Hunt has a long and storied history, but interestingly, reported sightings of them drop off dramatically post-Pact (1480s) in England, but continue in continental Europe. There are several ways they manifest in these sightings: a hunting pack baying after particular prey, the trooping dead, and a group of otherworldly women, much as appear later in the book. I’ve taken a few liberties with the descriptions, but Claude Leconteux’s Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead was tremendously useful and includes a lot of the extant historical reports.
The angels described at the beginning of chapter 10 (as quoted) are drawn directly from the letter of the previous week. The image was entirely too amusing not to play with. This may be my favourite opening of a chapter ever. Of course, those not of Albion don’t know about Schola or wrap it into their mental image of the British Isles.
Depending on which sources you believe, there were quite a few small witchcraft groups active around England in particular. It’s less clear exactly what any one of them meant by witchcraft, what their practices included, or how they came together. While the New Forest Coven (discussed later) had one mode, there are references to the group that Rufus connects with. They’re described as being more mixed in class and background, and including crafters and skilled agricultural workers who’d have a familiarity with the Horseman’s Word.
Chapters 18 and 22 : During this summer, Howard mentions a number of groups (outside the New Forest) doing rituals, and I drew on that for the ritual in Kent over May eve. There are few details, but the mentions are consistent enough Gabe brings them up.
There are also various mentions about the New Forest Coven doing rituals all through that summer. As usual, there’s some vagueness and contradictory information, but the full moons in May, June, and July seem plausible from the information we have. As noted in the book, May eve was one of the coldest in decades, and the rumour of someone dying from hypothermia is persistent in this bit of lore through several tellings. (As Gabe and Alexander note, blood being shed on the ground is a fairly constant approach to ritual deaths in a number of cultures.)
Here, we get the introductions of one of the things Heselton dug into. Ernie Mason and his two sisters were involved in quite a wide range of esoteric groups over time, and Heselton includes much of a conversation he had with someone who knew Ernie Mason well as an esotericist and teacher.
As discussed, their brother Alfred married Alice Wheeldon’s daughter, Winnie. Many of that family were active in anti-war politics as well as other progressive to radical causes. They were known to be sheltering men trying to escape conscription. In 1916, Alice, her daughters, and Alfred were accused of a conspiracy to murder Lloyd George, who had just become Prime Minister. Three of them – Alice, Winnie, and Alfred – were sentenced to prison. Recent review in 2022 suggests that the convictions would be likely overturned if they went before the Court of Appeals.
The Battle of Blythe Road is a real event, where the rivalry between William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley turned into a magical duel, or at least a public disagreement at the headquarters of the Golden Dawn in London. (The Golden Dawn was at the time one of the preeminent esoteric/occultic groups in the UK.) They shouted spells at each other, but the actual end of the event involved Yeats tripping Crowley, Crowley falling down the stairs, and Yeats calling the police to make sure Crowley wouldn’t return. The name stuck, though.
Chapter 38 : We have here our first actual direct appearance of known historical people, drawing on information from In Search of the New Forest Coven. As I mentioned, I did my best to tread lightly, but meetings of this general kind were (and still are) a way to feel out mutual interests in the witchcraft and other marginalised communities. You can read these two as fictional, but I was thinking of historical people when I wrote them. George, in this scene, is the pseudonym of Ernie Mason. I picked George as a pseudonym because it was both his father’s name and the name of the founder of the New Forest Rosicrucian Theatre, where Ernie was involved for some time.
Theano was the name that Edith Woodford-Grimes, often known in this bit of history as Dafo, had a particular fondness for. She played the role of Theano (wife or student of Pythagoras) in a play at the Rosicrucian Theatre, and also named one of her homes Theano.
Chapter 40 : In the various discussions about the location of the Lammas Night ritual, sources give a couple of different possible locations Gardner mentions the location as involving either the Rufus Stone or the Naked Man, but he also mentions they were starting points before going deeper into the New Forest. The Rufus Stone is on Geoffrey’s lands (and I wanted to avoid that) while the Naked Man was rather too near existing spaces in use by the Army.
I stared a lot at maps of the New Forest and realised that the Knightwood Oak was a substantial but manageable walk from both locations (forming a triangle with them). At this time, it was part of a large enclosure of ancient oaks, not near any particular settlements or current Army or military use, and suitably private. As well as having a very interesting tree. (Current research seems to suggest that Gabe’s estimate of the age is about right. Gabe knows his trees.)
The four figures Gabe sees standing together are arguably Rosamund Sabine, her husband George, Katherine Oldmeadow, and Gerald Gardner (identifiable by his goatee). Again, In Search of the New Forest Coven is what got me to focus on them. Though, as you see, they could be also other people, given those descriptions. What is notable is that all of them are on the older side. At this time, Rosamund Sabine and Katherine Oldmeadow are in their 70s, George Sabine was in his late 60s. Gardner, Dafo, and the Masons were in their 50s. Gabe and Isobel (at 40 and early 20s) are decidedly youthful by comparison.
On the other hand, if you’d like to assume they’re other people, feel free to do that too.
The text of the Charge that the priestess makes is taken from the oldest version of the Charge of the Goddess in Gardner’s writing, dating to before 1948. The first part is taken from Charles Leland’s Aradia, as is the last sentence. The middle bit, “At mine Altars the youth of Lacedaemon in Sparta made due sacrifice” was removed in later versions (Doreen Valiente’s, etc.) perhaps because it’s both geographically confused, and because there are later lines in the text about not needing sacrifices. Even if they are very much on Gabe’s mind at this point.
The actual shape of the ritual is drawn from comments Gardner made about it at various points. These include that the circle was marked out by brushwood, with a fire lit as candles in lanterns in the direction of the object of the rite (i.e. Hitler). They danced around the circle until enough power had been raised, then rushed in and out toward the light, shouting their desires. The text – “You cannot cross the sea, you cannot come” – is also as given by Gardner. The ritual was kept up until they were exhausted or someone passed out from exhaustion. Gardner explicitly doesn’t talk about the mechanics of the energy work (as we might use the term these days), but is explicit that it relied on the life forces of the participants.
I do hope you’ll join me for Gabe’s answer to Alexander’s question in Upon A Summer’s Day as soon as you can. Being Gabe, the interesting part, of course, isn’t the answer by itself, it’s how he’s going to go at it. That book has six point of view characters, so you get to see a bit of how Gabe, Rathna, Alexander, Geoffrey, Richard, and Alysoun fare through the second half of 1940.
My newsletter is always the best place to find out what’s coming out soon, and to get more historical tidbits, answers to questions, and extras! (I have quite a few in mind for this book.) If you’d like ways to make more connections with other books I’ve written, my authorial wiki has all sorts of ways to link characters, places, and events together.
Happiest of reading to you!