© Still Here Magazine
My story The Drove Road has recently been published in Volume 2, Issue 1 of Still Here magazine. Appropriately for its appearance a few weeks before Halloween, this edition of Still Here is both themed and subtitled Haunting Humanity and, accordingly, The Drove Road is a ghost story. However, its supernatural elements are very mild, perhaps existing only in somebody’s imagination. So, rather than attribute the story to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I attach to the scary fiction I write, I’ve attributed it instead to Steve Cashel, the moniker I usually put on non-scary stories that are set in Scotland.
And The Drove Road has a particularly Scottish setting. It’s inspired by the hike from Peebles, my hometown in the Scottish Borders, up to the top of 750-metre hill of Dunrig. It’s a route that follows the old Gypsy Glen Drove Road and takes you past slightly lower summits such as Kailzie Hill, Kirkhope Law, Birkscairn Hill and Stake Law.
Two other things also inspired The Drove Road. One is Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine (1984) – specifically a scene that occurs during a remembrance the main character, Jock McLeish, has of his youth, when he joined an amateur theatre group who were putting on a play at the Edinburgh Fringe. One day McLeish and his aspiring-thespian friends fill in time between performances by ascending Edinburgh’s most famous natural landmark, the ancient, extinct volcano Arthur’s Seat.
The other influence is something entirely different. It’s the Japanese YouTube anthology Fake Documentary Q (2021-present), whose episodes tell stories of the paranormal and unexplained via a ‘found footage’ (sometimes just ‘found audio’) format that employs various types of digital and analogue media. My story’s plot is inspired by one episode in particular, which is about some friends making a pilgrimage. But The Drove Yard also mimics the anthology generally in its use of assorted media — photographs, flyers, letters, emails, audio files, WhatsApp chats, etc. – to fill in the reader about what’s been happening.
Volume 2, Issue 1 of Still Here: Haunting Humanity can be downloaded for free here. As ever, it’s a bargain. This issue boasts no fewer than 19 short stories, 16 poems, two essays and seven pieces of art.
