Blog

Like Lichfield and Repton, Tamworth has long been known to be a capital of the Saxon Mercian kingdom. Visitors today will find a more modern castle which variously dates from the end of Saxon England up to the Victorian era, and one which is crammed with fascinating...

I write about the Saxon kingdom of Mercia a lot. I thought it had been entirely unintentional until now. But has it? I grew up in an area that would one have been in Mercia. From a seemingly young age, I knew Mercia had once been a kingdom in its own right. I knew I...

You know how some people become addicted to looking at house sites, like RightMove, searching for their perfect house, even though they have no intention of moving? Well, I’m like that, with Interiors magazines. I buy them all, from the ones that show how an...

When I was younger, I thought Valentine’s Day was a big commercial plot to trivialise love. I thought flowers and chocolates were cheesy and embarrassing gifts with no thought behind them. I was convinced it was better to show love every day in small gestures – making...

Things never turn out well when there’s more than one female living under the same roof, and in this book there are three. Dora, Her mother Mary and her grandmother Edith. The inspiration for this storyline was drawn from my personal experience of living with my...

Under One Roof was inspired by a tweet, someone had bought a house and found a hidden room. Twitter was fascinated. People were desperate to know what was inside. It made me want to research rooms that people have found and led me to imagine discovering one myself,...

In my latest novel A Mother’s Secret, one of the main characters Helena O’Herlihy makes a shocking discovery about her husband and needs to take a little time out from her problems so she leaves Dublin and escapes to Ballycladdagh in the west of Ireland which is the...

Maggie is eighteen now and she has a burning ambition to follow in Granny Peggy’s footsteps and run the Pig & Whistle – but she has lots of new ideas for the future.  Maggie wants to introduce a more modern menu and to liven the atmosphere.  Peggy isn’t sure it...