In the autumn of 2012 we visited Soglio to meet up with our Swiss friends Stef and Pia Hagmann.

We stayed at a wonderful family run hotel. Those of you who have been to Switzerland may agree ‘everything there is perfect: scenery, people, food, trains, buses, shops, restaurants - just everything’.

One day during our stay, the peace of the Soglio valley was disturbed by a rescue helicopter. It circled for hours on end. We were advised people had been trapped on the high tops by a landslip.

In a nearby village, we visited a Museum which contained a prison. There was a reference to a Witch Trial.

These two elements provided the core for the story. It is set in the early 1800s. It involves a girl called Hannah Sugli who lives on an isolated farm above the village of Soglio and a man called Edward MacLennan, a Geologist from Glasgow University who makes a series of summer visits reseaching landsides. There is an odd boy called Ivan who is unable to speak. Ivan is clever and has a key role to play as the drama unfolds.

This is a work of fiction. In its first incarnation it was almost completed in 2014 then became in enmeshed in an editing backlog.

Over the last months of 2024 I revisited the 2014 version and that is what you read here.

I would classify this piece as historical, romantic fiction. It is a novella comprising 64,000 words.

This version has been self-edited using the “Read Aloud” feature in Microsoft Word.

Please be forgiving: if you find errors, misspellings, missing words etc, please make your own best judgement about what the story intends and read on.

(Tragically, in August 2017 there was a major landslide near Bondo, a few miles from Soglio, resulting in many deaths. The landslide travelled over 6.5 km.) Here is a YouTube link.

https://youtu.be/ACTfEspuZYc?si=631V0CdreRQg3Qba

Note: The format of the PDF now includes a Table of Contents which allows readers to navigate directly to Chapters.

My grateful thanks to Micael Mackenzie who created my website. He did this for me and hopefully, if I can master the how to do this and be able to amend other longer stories to include this feature.