Flaxman Low, the Victorian ghost-hunter, is staying with some friends on their Northumberland estate. He is intrigued by reports of a strange figure seen – and heard – on a lonely stretch of road crossing the moor. Could it be a stray tramp... or something more sinister?

A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.

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Major Hesketh Vernon Prichard, later Hesketh-Prichard (1876–1922) led an intrepid life as an adventurer, explorer, hunter, marksman and first-class cricketer, in addition to his work as a journalist and author. He was born in Jhansi, India, the son of a British army officer, although his father died from typhoid just weeks before his birth. His mother, Kate O'Brien Ryall Prichard, brought him back to Britain and raised him alone. At school at Rugby, and later Fettes College, Edinburgh, he excelled at sports, especially cricket. He decided to train as a lawyer after leaving school, although he never practised, deciding instead to travel through southern Europe and north Africa – the prelude to many years of travel and exploration around the world, which led him to places previously unseen by any European.

His fiction writing career began at the age of nineteen when he sold his first story to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1896; his mother helped him to refine the story, and they afterwards wrote together under the pseudonym "E. and H. Heron", contributing numerous stories to journals such as Cornhill Magazine. It was under the "Heron" pseudonyms that they produced the Flaxman Low stories in Pearson's Magazine in 1898. Flaxman Low was a new type of character – the first "psychic detective" investigating ghosts and the occult, preceding Algernon Blackwood's John Silence and William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki by a decade or more. Low's adventures proved hugely popular, although it's reported that Hesketh-Prichard and his mother were unhappy that the stories were promoted by the magazine as being "true" or "real" ghost stories. After 12 adventures, the character of Flaxman Low was retired, and mother and son moved on to other series, including 'The Chronicles of Don Q' (1904), featuring a Spanish Robin Hood-style figure, Don Quebranta Huesos. As a solo author, Hesketh-Prichard also created 'November Joe', a Canadian backwoodsman detective (1913).

Although rejected for active service (due to his age) by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Hesketh-Prichard was eventually sent to the front as a war correspondent/press officer for the British War Office. While there he noted poor marksmanship on display, and used his experience as a hunter to initiate sniper training for soldiers in the trenches. This work won him the DSO. He was invalided out of war service in 1917, and remained in poor health for the remainder of his life. He reportedly died of sepsis in June 1922, although it's now speculated that untreated malaria may have been a significant factor. He was survived by his mother, who died in 1935, by his wife Elizabeth (married 1908), who lived until 1975, and their three children.

'The Story of the Moor Road' was first published in Pearson's Magazine in March 1898, under the pseudonym "E. and H. Heron", and later appeared in book form when the stories were collected together as 'Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low' in 1899.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2022.