I heard the strangest sound overhead – I thought it was a metal detector or maybe a robot, and couldn’t for the life of me understand why it was coming from the sky. It was nearly 20 years later that I finally learned what a lapwing sounds like.

Actually, for most of my life I didn’t know the names of many birds beyond magpies and sparrows, or the difference between beech and birch. I grew up outside Whitehaven and spent much of those years playing outdoors with my brothers and friends: nature was the backdrop to our fantasy worlds, inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Mounds of earth overgrown with long grasses were our mountain ranges; the bog at the bottom of the field was a deadly swamp. There was a whole village in the hollows of the hawthorn hedges, and an old railway sleeper behind the barn was a narrow bridge over a ravine.

I spent my days projecting magical lands onto what was really there, so naturally it was only after I left that I began to notice what lay beneath. I had to move to the other side of the world to become truly homesick – enough to start planning a story set in the place where I grew up. That is how I came to write The Sky Beneath the Stone and create the world of Underfell.

The book would be about a girl whose brother is turned into a kestrel, who has to travel through a hole in a drystone wall into the fairy realm to retrieve him. I remembered all the stories I’d been told about the landscape as we’d travelled around with visiting family. Underfell would be a parallel Cumbria where all those stories were true and present, inhabited by characters from history and creatures from legend.

The environment would be much the same, birds and animals passing freely between the two realms. This was where I really had to educate myself. Now that I was living in a completely different landscape, learning new names of plants and animals, I finally noticed the glaring gaps in my knowledge about my homeland. I decided that Ivy, the protagonist, would have the ecological literacy that I didn’t have at thirteen.

I spent many hours looking up bird calls on YouTube and scanning the species explorer on the Cumbria Wildlife Trust website. I was on the phone to my wife in the airport, trying to remember the name of the furry plant that gets stuck to your clothes, when a helpful stranger suggested it might be stickyweed. (It was.)

The rural primary school I attended had a concrete playground with high walls. I don’t remember learning about native flora and fauna at any point. I can’t control the curriculum, but at least I could do this: normalise a character who knows her surroundings intimately, who can name almost everything she sees, from fells to flowers. Perhaps if I had read about a character like Ivy when I was younger, I might have discovered the fascination that our natural environment holds sooner.

From the network of reserves they maintain to the events they run, along with the amazing walking and wildlife-spotting resources on their website, the work that Cumbria Wildlife Trust does is invaluable. Not only is it vital to raising the next generation of kids like Ivy, their work equally inspires and educates adults like me! From early on in the process I wanted this book to support that work, and I’m happy to say 10% of author royalties from the sale of each copy of The Sky Beneath the Stone are being donated to Cumbria Wildlife Trust.

For Ivy, Underfell is a strange and enchanted place, but the Cumbria she knows is already a source of wonder. I think every child inherently understands the magic of growing up in a wild, biodiverse place, which is why access to nature is so important. The work of Cumbria Wildlife Trust is keeping that magic alive for future generations.

Alex Mullarky, author of The Sky Beneath the Stone. Join Alex at an online event on 2 August 2022 or come along to Dubbs Moss to enjoy Tea in the Trees with Alex and creative Jessica Meaghan on 13 August 2022. 

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