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Winterbringers by Gill Arbuthnott

MORTON OF PITMILLY AND 'WINTERBRINGERS'

I'm a children's writer, and set my first two novels in Edinburgh. I went to University in St Andrews, and still have friends around the East Neuk, so since I discovered Morton of Pitmilly, I've often come for a weekend with my family. It's a magic place, with plenty for all of us to do, and the chance that I'll get some time to spend on writing, while the children are in the pool or the games room!

Gradually, the area began to work its way into my head as a possible setting for my third novel, and I decided to set it between St Andrews and Crail, using real places, thinly disguised. You will certainly recognise my 'Pitmilly Cottages' if you have ever stayed at Morton. I like to include bits of local legend in my books, which are fantasies aimed at the 9-12 age group, and there was plenty to choose from: haunted houses, big cat sightings, disappearing graves, and witches, to name but a few. If I'd tried to fit everything into one book it would have been bigger than a Harry Potter, so I settled on witches and weather as my themes.

The main characters in 'Winterbringers' as it came to be called, are a teenage boy called Josh, staying at Pitmilly on summer holiday with his mother, and Callie, an eccentric local girl. When the weather turns so cold that even the sea starts to freeze, they are dragged into a race against time to find what Agnes the teenage witch accidentally did almost 300 years before that has upset the balance of the seasons so catastrophically now and stop the ice creatures called the Winterbringers locking Scotland into an everlasting winter.

If you read the book, you'll recognise St Andrews, Morton of Pitmilly itself, and Kingsbarns (slightly disguised as the village of Pitmilly). Another important setting is Constantine's Cave, just off the golf course at Fife Ness. And when some of the characters travel in a strange boat to the Kingdom of Summer, the stream that takes them there is the tiny one next to the road at Morton. I'd always thought it was wonderfully mysterious, overgrown and lush in the summer, and frosty in the winter. It was very easy to imagine it leading to another world altogether.

My children were freaked out when the first time we stayed at Morton after the book's publication, we had snow in March, and a power cut (a power cut plays a part in the book's plot). I think they were beginning to wonder if I'd woken something mysterious by writing what I did. It's an easy place to believe that magical things can happen, after all!

If you are interested in buying a copy of the Winterbringers please click on the link below.

• Winterbringers