Readers often ask if Tredham is a real historical place. Or if it is based on one. And when exactly my stories are set.
The short answer to the first question is no. Tredham is just my invention. You won’t find it or its valley on any historical map. Nor is it modeled on any real-world location you could put a pin in. After all, strict historical accuracy isn’t what I’m aiming for in my stories. The Tales of Tredham are not – and aren’t trying to be – a history of a real place. Tredham and its surroundings are instead imagined as a setting where Ed, Rhiann and Will can explore their world and themselves. And where they can delve into and live out the social and emotional bonds that make up their community.
Everything has a foundation, though. For me, the imaginative basis for Tredham is the Welsh Marches: the rugged lands along the border between what are now England and Wales. Borderlands have a special allure. They are places where different peoples, cultures and languages come up against each other. Where what might look like neat divisions on a map so often turn out to be more fuzzy (and much more interesting) when you look in close. Places of encounter, exchange and – sometimes – conflict. I imagine Tredham as sitting in one such place: somewhere on the blurred boundary between the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon worlds.
Not that anyone in Tedham would have you told you that. Its people knew little about the world beyond their narrow valley. A remote farming community, Tredham was not a place that had or made much that the outside world might want. Nor did it take much from outside in return. Tredham folk had to meet their needs, as best they could, with whatever they could grow, forage or make for themselves. That gave its people little reason to travel: few had ever left the village and those who had did not go far. So the people of Tredham could hardly know that their village was near the edge of some remote ruler’s domains. In that, Tredham was typical of so many small isolated communities back in its time.
Back when exactly? That’s another question I get asked from time to time. As with the where, the exact when isn’t essential to the stories. The world before our modernity – when fire gave the only artificial light and there was no transport faster than a horse – endured for many centuries. Isolated subsistence farming communities could be found throughout. So in a sense it doesn’t matter exactly when the Tales of Tredham are set (one reviewer suggested the Iron Age). But for what it’s worth, I imagined Tredham toward the end of what we would now call the Anglo-Saxon period, a little before the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century. Another boundary that we now mark but that the people of Tredham could not have known they were living near.
In a sense, all storytelling is about boundaries. The line between the known and the unknown, the real and the imagined. Stories are about different people’s desires, needs and perspectives meeting, mixing, compromising, clashing. Each of us lives in a distinct worlds of our own perception: the encounters between those worlds is what drives narrative forward. In the Tales of Tredham Ed, Rhiann and Will live and grow the friendship that connects their individual experiences. All as the children test the boundaries of their village: both physically as they venture out into the hills and forests and socially in their encounters with the outcast wild man Finn. In many senses, then, the Tales of Tredham are stories from the frontier.