Background Research For “The Snow Witch” by Kirsty Ferry

Kirsty Ferry returns to my blog this week with an insight into the research for her new novel The Snow Witch out on 3 September 2026. Over to Kirsty …

My latest book, The Snow Witch, is due out on 3^rd September. It’s a witchy gothic timeslip, and it’s based in Northumberland up at Hadrian’s Wall. The timelines we visit in the book are modern day, and 1650 – the year after the Newcastle Witch Trials took place, and the year that 16 of the people accused of witchcraft were executed on the Town Moor.

In the book, we meet Meg, who lives in the small village of Newbrough in 1650, and is accused of witchcraft. In the modern day, Violet visits the area, and feels a deep connection to Meg – and comes to understand that the evil that surrounded Meg’s death hasn’t quite left the place.

The story is all based, believe it or not, on fact. There really was a ‘witch’ called Meg who lived in Newbrough, and her ashes were scattered in a small river that flows down from a place called Coventina’s Well, close to a Mithraic Temple and a Roman fort. The river is called Meggie’s Dene Burn, and Coventina’s Well was a sacred place of worship for the Roman soldiers. The burn springs from the Well and flows past Meg’s cottage in Newbrough, and down to the River South Tyne.

Of course, my story is fiction. In the real world, nobody really knows anything about Meg, and in the village itself, she is known as Old Meg. I’ve knocked a few decades off her apparent age and reimagined her story, fitting all the bits and bobs I researched around her and the Witch Trials into one coherent (I hope) story. I loved doing it.

One of the most interesting things I learned during my research was that the Well was excavated in the 1800s by John Clayton, and they found hundreds and hundreds of offerings in it. But there wasn’t just jewellery and coins – there were altars and statues, and any number of Pagan pieces located in the water. Nobody knows what happened – all the items were seemingly just picked up and thrown in there one day. Theories differ between the fact that the fort was raided and the raiders did it, or the soldiers did it to keep their artefacts safe from the raiders – or the fact that the soldiers were told to convert to Christianity and had to get rid of the Pagan objects.

Oh, and there was also a skull in the Well.

Did I mention that??

Well, to be fair, it’s a partial skull – again, the imaginative people suggest there was human sacrifice at the Well, but the most likely scenario is that it belongs to a Bronze Age burial in the moors, and was just swept down there, thanks to nature and rain and all that sort of stuff. But I was very keen to see the skull – for research purposes, of course – and therefore had a good look at Chesters Museum where many of the artefacts are now housed. And I did see it!

After all that, I desperately wanted to see the Well itself. I looked at maps and spoke to the chap who used to run the mobile coffee van in the car park. And around about 15 years ago, I went for a walk, and found it.

In my book, the Well is basically a giant puddle now…

In reality, it’s the same!

I didn’t know what to expect, really, but a puddle was not it. However, I went back there recently and got a bit closer to it by trudging through nettles and spiky plants and sheep, and working my way along a barbed wire fence. They don’t make it easy for you to get close to it, which is sensible as it’s fenced off for a reason – that reason being it’s seven feet deep. The atmosphere, though, is something else. My characters experienced the same sense of ‘otherness’ as I did, so that’s where that came from. It genuinely is a very quiet and still place, and I would not be surprised if the ghosts of witches and Romans wander those moors without any help from my fictional world. If you read it, I do hope you enjoy it – and maybe visit there yourselves if you ever come to Northumberland.

About Kirsty Ferry

Kirsty is from the North East of England and won the English Heritage/Belsay Hall National Creative Writing competition in 2009 with the ghostly tale ‘Enchantment’.

Her timeslip novel, ‘Some Veil Did Fall’, a paranormal romance set in Whitby, was published by Choc Lit in Autumn 2014. Many of her subsequent Choc Lit books have since been re-published by Joffe Books, including her popular Cornish Secrets timeslip series. Kirsty now writes dark, witchy, Gothic timeslips for Boldwood, with her first Boldwood book being ‘The Witch’s Stone’ . Her second Boldwood book, ‘The Snow Witch’, is due out in September 2026, and the third, ‘The Witch of the Solstice’ is due in February 2027.

Kirsty has a BA (Hons) in Literature, and achieved a Masters with Distinction in Creative Writing from Northumbria University in 2016.

Social Media Links:-

You can follow Kirsty on her Facebook Author Page and also on Instagram @kirstyferrybooks

About The Snow Witch

Two women. One ancient well. A dark secret trapped in the ice.

In the dead of winter, 1650…

As the Newcastle Witch Trials spread fear across the north, suspicion takes hold in Newbrough, near Hadrian’s Wall. Meg Noble – healer, midwife, and the so-called ‘Snow Witch’ – finds solace at Coventina’s Well. But when tragedy strikes, whispers of witchcraft begin to swirl, and something ancient is stirred – bound to a sacred dagger and a forgotten goddess.

Now, beneath the same well…

Historian Violet Marsh arrives at Hadrian’s Wall to research the legend of the Snow Witch, but what begins as curiosity soon turns personal. As visions haunt her and the past bleeds into the present, Violet uncovers a story that was never laid to rest – and a presence that has been waiting centuries to reclaim what was taken.

The Snow Witch is a chilling, atmospheric tale of buried vengeance and unyielding female power – where the past doesn’t die, it freezes and waits.

Buying link here

This is the blog for Morton S. Gray, writer of romance with a mystery to solve The Secrets of Borteen Bay Series set in the fictional seaside town of Borteen for Choc Lit Publishing an imprint of Joffe Books.