Matt Gilbert – “Locked in”

I’m very pleased have a new poem up on the Black Nore Review website. Not least because they are based in the West Country and their logo is a silhouette of Portishead’s Black Nore Lighthouse (coincidentally, there’s a poem about it in my book Street Sailing). Click the link below to read ‘it’Locked In’. Locked…

A place on the shelf 2: The Great Ghost Rescue

For the young me, the ghost stories and folklore of Britain had a powerful effect. Odd to think of it now, but reading about the dead as a child, brought the wider world to a rich and vivid life.

Out there, it seemed, was a land, far older, stranger and deeper than my limited experience. A world where multiple layers of history could still be seen, or felt, not only in old houses, ruined castles and abbeys, but also in and around more ordinary sites such as shops, factories, pubs and suburban streets.

Upper Vatch Mill & a ghost I never saw

Dead rats aside, there was one area of the garden that always made me feel a little uneasy. As the name suggests, there was once a mill here.

In the late 18th century it was a paper mill, but by the 1820s had become a cloth-mill. By the end of the Victorian era, the mill was gone, but perhaps something else lingered in the grounds.

All back to Asselega’s place

Is it possible to be haunted by a place? I think that I may be. In this case it is Ashley Vale in Bristol – an exceptional urban oasis caught between the tracks, containing allotments, woods, hilltops and a pub next door to a farm.