Another local book found, Alan Garner’s The Old Man of Mow. It’s a story woven around a set of photos of two boys having random adventures and exploring in and around Mow Cop.

The cover picture shows them at the foot of the giant column of rock known as The Old Man of Mow, on the summit of Mow Cop.

The photos were obviously not staged with the story in mind, as the story seems rather loose and shoe-horned in afterwards. Such things can work, and the British photo-comics of the 1970s made them work in b&w for an audience in middle-childhood. But in this instance one imagines that not many children were impressed on reading the book. Most of the photos are in mid-1960s black-and-white, in that dour Bill Brandt sort of style that was then fashionable among agitprop photographers of the inner-city. It doesn’t suit the rural setting or the tale.

Still, the storyteller was Alan Garner and some of the colour pictures are fine , so it’s of some interest. In 2020 one might even ask permission to revisit the book with an ink pen and watercolours, to make a new and lighter version by drawing over the photos.

Garner’s Red Shift would revisit the site a few years later…