Bishop Auckland writer's new novel is inspired by family history

MY grandmother Sara Elen came to County Durham as the child of a migrating miner in the 1890s.

Her first language was Welsh and she had the creative skills of making, singing and storytelling common to people of that Celtic heritage.

She was also reputed to have second sight. Her eldest daughter Lily was a spiritualist medium. These are all sides of my own heritage with which I most identify. I frequently say I was the first generation to write it down.

Illustration from the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythic text

A year or so back I began to examine my grandmother Sarah Elen’s childhood train journey from Chester via Liverpool, Leeds, York and Durham. I overlaid this map with a transparency of Roman Roads. I then made a sideways move into thinking of pathways before the Romans of ancient pathways, inspired by a book first published in 1925 called The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones. This was by Alfred Watkins - the father of the notion of "ley lines", the ground traces of men moving through landscape, not just here in Britain and now, but all over the world, going right back in history.

Then, coincidentally I had this conversation in a London Park with actress Lisa Tarbuck and became intrigued where it turned out she also was fascinated in the notion of ley lines – this time in London. She recommended to me Pathways to Enlightenment: London's Ley Lines by the appropriately named Christopher E Street.

Having absorbed this committed essay on ley lines in parochial London, I went back to look more closely at my own town of Bishop Auckland, whose main shopping street, Newgate Street (leading back to Cockton Hill Road and Watling Road) faithfully follows the route of the Roman Road called Dere Street. My Roman map tells me this leads on to Scotland and back to Piercebridge and onwards south.

Following my writer’s instinct I started to research the Welsh end of my grandmother Sarah Elen’s journey, and was led to the captivating Welsh mythic text the Mabinogion – based on thousands of years of oral history of that region.

It refers to Sarn Helen, a partially surviving causeway that makes its way across Wales. One tale in the Mabinogion relates how an Emperor of Rome came to Britain and wooed and won Elen, the daughter of a British King, who evolved as time went on to become St Helen, patron saint of roads. Watkins asserts that these long distance roads were of native design and execution even at the time of the Roman Conquest and can also be traced to the ancient line of Helen and her father, the British king or tribal leader, and the area of West Britain we now call Wales.

Archaeological evidence of pre-Christian and Celtic artefacts suggests that these roads were made by traders who made and used efficient straight pathways that traced the length and breadth of Britain and pre-dated the Roman roads by hundreds of years. My reading also suggested that there were people and families who were experts at this straight pathfinding.

So my new novel The Pathfinder finally came from my re-imagining of the story Elen, daughter of a British King, who actually exists in Welsh oral and some written history, and the historically referenced Roman Commander Magnus Maximus, who survives in the Welsh history as Macsen Wledig. I have also featured Bishop Auckland as Aclet, a British township on Dere Street on the way to the Roman fort of Vinovium (present day Binchester).

In an early chapter, my character Elen, the daughter of a Welsh King, and her brother Lleu, on a trading mission from her home in West Britain (Wales), having called at various trading posts on Dere Street, arrive at the home of their kinsman Baedda in the township of Aclet. They arrive on Midsummer’s Eve and the next day Elen and Lleu participate in the Aclet Midsummer Revels, where their party piece is walking on fire.

Of course there is much more to The Pathfinder than that. Once I embarked on this novel it drove itself, expanding into a full-blown historical fiction against the background of the Roman Empire as it started to crack into pieces. But this rather large novel started with my curiosity about my grandmother Sarah Elen and her journey north to the flourishing County Durham coalfield. In our family she was a pathfinder in her own way - as each of us have been, in our own way, in the succeeding generations.

I have felt Sarah Elen close at my shoulder all the time when I was writing this novel. Through the mirror over my desk I would glimpse her with her arms folded over her crossover apron, nodding her approval.

• The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins (1925 – also later editions)
• Pathways to Enlightenment: London’s Ley Lines (2010) by Christopher E Street.
• Britain BC by Francis Pryor (2004)
• Britain AD by Francis Pryor (2005)
• The Pathfinder is available in County Durham Libraries and obtainable from amazon.co.uk as an eBook and paperback