In the present day, Viking ancestry is strong in Scotland, most notably in Shetland. Up Helly Aa, the Viking boat burning festival that I described, is an annual festival that is held on the last Tuesday in January in Lerwick. I put it at a slightly different time of year, but it is roughly as I described it. In real life, there isn’t a standing stone circle near Lerwick. Instead, I based this circle on the Stones of Stenness found on Mainland Orkney. They do not have Viking carvings on them, however.
On the Isle of Wyre in Orkney, there really is a small ruined castle and a chapel called St. Mary’s. Both were built during the Viking period in the 12th century AD. The castle ruins are smaller than I described them in the book and the walls do not contain carvings.
However, there are ancient neolithic sites in Scotland that have been modified by the Vikings. Maeshowe, the site of the final battle in the story, is one of these sites.
Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered cairn built around 2800 BC on Mainland Orkney. Similar structures were built as passage graves to house the bodies of important people. However, no burials were found in Maeshowe (that we know of), and experts are unsure of exactly what the cairn was used for. The entrance to the tomb is aligned with the winter solstice sunrise so that the back wall of the interior is lit up when the sun rises on that day.
From the outside, it looks like a massive round hill covered in grass. The interior is a small square chamber accessed via an entrance passage that is 36 feet long. I modified the chamber in the book to be round because it suited the story better. I also added a forest around the cairn, which is not there in real life.
Around the 12th century, the tomb was looted by Vikings who had made their home on Orkney. Earl Harald Maddadarson and Ragnvald, Earl of More, were responsible, and they left behind more than thirty inscriptions on the walls, all of them written in runes.
Maeshowe was later looted by an antiquarian by the name of James Farrer in 1861. The characters in Pack of Lies don’t speak favorably of antiquarians, and for good reason. Antiquarians were the predecessors to modern day archaeologists, but they were not the same. Many antiquarians were more concerned with obtaining treasure than they were with the past. As a result, they often destroyed archaeological sites and the information that they contained (something an archaeologist would not do). James Farrer was no different. He broke through the top of the mount, as well a the side, and removed everything from the interior.
That is pretty much it for the history mentioned in Pack of Lies. I hope you stick with Eve and Lachlan for the rest of their adventure!
About Linsey
Before becoming a writer, Linsey Hall was a nautical archaeologist who studied shipwrecks from Hawaii and the Yukon to the UK and the Mediterranean. She credits fantasy and historical romances with her love of history and her career as an archaeologist. After a decade of tromping around the globe in search of old bits of stuff that people left lying about, she settled down and started penning her own romance novels. Her Dragon’s Gift series draws upon her love of history and the paranormal elements that she can't help but include.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All reference to events, persons, and locale are used fictitiously, except where documented in historical record. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright 2021 by Linsey Hall
Published by Bonnie Doon Press LLC
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except in instances of quotation used in critical articles or book review. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.
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