Once More With Footnotes

Horseman's Word, or the Hunting of the Wren ... in a sense, I've never not known them.
     
                  I can remember my father telling me about the treacle mines at Bisham, near Marlow, when I was about eight. I used to watch closely fro m the back of the car when we passed through the village, in case I saw the treacle lorries. I recall considering the matter in much the same way as small children think about Father Christmas and we think about world peace — the deep suspicion that it can' t possibly be real is almost overwhelmed by a fervent hope that it might be true.
     
                  By the logic of Discworld, incidentally, treacle mines seem quite reasonable. We know that if time and geology crush a herd of dead dinosaurs, you get oil. If you flatten a swamp, you get coal. So, if an inundation sweeps across a vast field of primitive sugar cane, you surely end up with a rich underground reserve of, yes, treacle. In some areas this would solidify and subsequently be mined as pig treacle, or hokey-pokey, g reat sticky seams in the rock, but your real prospector would surely comb the wilderness for signs of the true liquid gold. A pretty good one would be an area where the animals no longer have any teeth, of course.
     
                  Probably the one aspect of the series th at truly capitalises on all that reading is the kingdom of Lancre, which I suspect is a somewhat idealised version of the little fold in the Chiltern Hills where I grew up, stirred in with the western area of the Mendips where I spent a great deal of my a d ult life in a cottage which had previously belonged to Violet Alford's brother. It was there that I once heard an old man in a cider house refer to a fox as Reynard, quite unselfconsciously. There I wandered around the fields looking for the Wimblestone, w hich comes alive at night, and once I heard the ghost of the horse which used to be tethered outside the back door. Well, it was 3 a.m., there was the sound of a horse outside, I knew about the ghost, and I wasn't about to spoil a good story by checking. I am a journalist, after all.
     
                  Lancre is, as it were, solid folklore. It is a constitutional monarchy, and its largely peasant population are loyalists to a man. People often misunderstand that word, but it means that while they perceive their duty to be l oyal to the monarch, they also clearly perceive it as his duty to be loyal to them. In short, they won't be druv.
     
                  The true power in the kingdom, however, lies with the witches, of which three or four feature in some of the books. Magic on Discworld lies, as I said, mostly in the nature of the environment; the witches use broomsticks, certainly, but mostly their power is derived from a zest for life, a clear-headed grasp of psychology, a gift for natural medicine, and an absolute refusal to be overawed by any situation.
     
                  Right from the start my main three fell into a natural trio — young Magrat, kind, well-meaning, and wet; Nanny Ogg, plump, motherly, and experienced (as she says, she's had a lot of husbands, and three of them were her own), and Granny Weath erwax, crabby, sharp, and proud. I am quite proud of Granny, who was cut out by nature to be a powerfully bad witch and is simply too proud to be one and generates from this internal conflict a sort of creative anger.
     
                  The land they live in is folklore ma de solid. There are caves underneath which, of course, go everywhere. There is an earthwork known as the Long Man, whose general configuration can best be left to the imagination.
     
                  There are several stone circles, one of which is of course a gateway to an other world. There is even a famous lone standing stone. It is more accurately a stone circle consisting of one stone which, in obedience to the general superstition in these matters, cannot be counted. When it feels that someone is looking at it in a calc ulating way, it hides in the peat bog.
     
                  In odd corners of Lancre can be found the original "place where the sun does not shine", a deep hollow in the ground from which occasionally emerged a variety of things, all of which have, of course, been put where the sun does not shine.
     
                  I did not, to be frank, have to work hard at this. It was like picking apples from a low