Description

In an epic, deeply moving novel set on the Pennine Moors, Elizabeth has abandoned avalanche science to restore the moor's desolate peatlands. She treks in the footsteps of Isabel who, five centuries earlier, herds her cattle to remote summering grounds.

Alston Moor is a polyphonic novel creating a portrait over time of one of England's most remote landscapes, a landscape now suffering degradation and threatened by arson and wildfire.
In 1548, Isabel and her father, together with the priest in this poorest of parishes, grapple with the chaos of the Protestant reformation. Enacted in far away centres of power, the reforms turn daily life and religious traditions upside down. Statues, images of the saints, rosaries, prayer books are burned. Masses for the dead are denounced as the corrupt practice of a money-grubbing clergy. Isabel holds fast to the old ways. But at her summering ground she encounters the more-worldly cattle drovers who fall into rebellious talk. Surely there are no protestant sympathisers in her parish.

Today, in equally tumultuous and disruptive times, a grieving Elizabeth and her scientist team attempt to right the ecological wrongs and profligacy of the industrial era - the pollution, the age-old tradition of peat cutting for fuel, the draining of peat bogs for cultivation and the spread of sitka spruce plantations. The peatlands offer a climate life-line and there is no time to lose.
The novel interrogates how society confronts crisis, whether through science, faith or ritual, and how landscape bears witness to human struggle across the centuries.