Bladys of the Stewponey by BARING-GOULD, Sabine

The setting, geography and history of this story by Revd Sabine Baring-Gould, author of Onward Christian Soldiers and a number of other well-known hymns, are all accurate, or at least as accurate as local lore will allow. Kinver has long been a midlands beauty spot, and the UK National Trust own and open one of the rock-dwellings mentioned. The Stewponey too was an inn until a year or two into the twenty-first century: http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/Reminder-of-the-heyday-of-the-old-Stewponey-2.htm - the present reader having stopped there for a drink and a meal many times. The story, whether you call it a romance, a historical novel or a horror story - comprising as it does a young woman being offered as a prize in a bowling match, a wife-burning, highwaymen and buried treasure - is of course wholly fiction. (Introduction by AJM)