Twenty years ago I did my teaching practice in Chippenham. I remembered a local spring where if you were willing to plunge your hands into freezing cold water and sieve through the mud at the bottom. I wanted to go back there because I want to use the star shape fossils in a young adult novel I’m planning. The troops were a little uncertain. So off we went in the car complete with dog in the back on a research mission.
I had printed out the directions;
"East of Bitteston...is a spring - they call it a holy well, - where five-pointed stones doe bubble up (Astreites) which doe move in vinegar." (Aubrey 1969, 45) The seventeenth-century Wiltshire antiquarian John Aubrey notes with his characteristic air of scientific enquiry the outstanding feature of this most magical of Wiltshire wells. Holy well is a natural spring rising at a fault line between the cornbrash layer of the Great Oolite and its overlying clay. Blocks of masonry nearby indicate that the well once had a stone surround and drinking trough, but these have apparently been moved aside and now the spring has returned to its natural state, flowing from a hole in a fold in the land.”
Then after a few wrong turns, finally using latitude and longitude, sinking in mud, crossing a small stream we found Starwell or The Holy Well. In the sandy bed of the spring can be found tiny fossils shaped like stars, which are constantly being freed from the fossil-bearing cornbrash by the action of the spring water, which brings them to the surface. These stars are the isolated stem parts, or columnals, of crinoids, the plant-like sea-creatures commonly known as sea lilies. Crinoids are related to starfish, hence the star-like shape of the columnals; and because they are made of calcite, they will indeed (if you can bear to destroy them) effervesce in a dilute acid solution like vinegar.
Once my daughter found the first little star she was on a mission. It was lovely, and we would probably be there still if another family who liked to throw large stones in the water hadn’t shown up.
It was a lovely day. The tension from the day before had faded replaced with lovely memories and I got some of my research done.
The top prize is actually £3000 now and total prize values are £4500!
Here are the details from their website.
Cash prizes totaling £4500 ($7200) can be won in the Writers' Village International Short Fiction Competition summer 2014 for prose fiction in any genre up to 3000 words.
The first prize is £3000 ($4800), with a second prize of £500 ($800),third prize of £250 ($400) and 15 runner up prizes of £50 ($80).
The top 50 contestants, whether they win a cash prize or not, will also gain a brief personal critique of their stories.
That's 50 opportunities to win a valuable prize!
The Writers' Village award is one of the world's largest short story competitions that specifically welcomes new writers from anywhere in the English-speaking world.
Prizes will go to those writers whose short stories show the greatest originality, mastery of the craft skills of creative writing, and power to move the reader.
The new summer 2014 contest follows the continuing success of the previous 11 Writers' Village short story competitions, entered by writers from all over the world.
Lawrence Block is one of the most widely recognized names in the mystery and suspense genre. He was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar and Shamus Awards. His most recent novels are The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, Hit Me and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and The Liar’s Bible.
Jill Dawson is the Orange and Whitbread-shortlisted author of eight novels including Fred and Edie, The Great Lover and Watch Me Disappear. Her most recent, The Tell-Tale Heart,will be published in 2014 by Sceptre. She teaches creative writing for the Faber Academy and Guardian/UEA and works individually with new writers at Gold Dust, a mentoring scheme for writers which she founded in 2010.
Dr John Yeoman, MA Oxon, MA (Res), MPhil, PhD Creative Writing is a university tutor in creative writing and has been a successful commercial writer and publisher for 42 years. He established Writers' Village in 2009.
Here's a new opportunity to win a full professional critique of your soon-to-be-published novel.
Every calendar quarter the Writers' Village Foundation will endow several bursaries having a notional cash value of up to £500 (approx.$800) each. The bursaries must be redeemed for copy critiques at the Hilary Johnson Authors’ Advisory Service. Two bursaries worth up to£500 each will be awarded in the current round ending midnight GMT 31st March 2014.
The principal judge for the Foundation awards is novelist Michelle Spring, a mentor for the Arts Council’s Escalator program and a Royal Literary Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge.