00:00The fog, which had been heavy in London when I left on this mid-October morning, extended even to Hazelmere.
00:10When I left the Royal Huts Inn on the top of Hind Head in order to visit the Devil's Punchbowl...
00:19So it was really a consequence of deafness that all of this resulted from.
00:30I was doing archival research to pass the time in the National Library of Ireland and
00:36during that process, which took me several weeks,
00:40I found an advert for this story and I read the words Gibbett Hill
00:44and I knew that that wasn't a Bram Stoker story that I'd ever heard of in any of the biographies or bibliographies and
00:50I was just astounded, flabbergasted. I couldn't believe it that I was potentially looking at a lost ghost story from Bram Stoker,
00:58especially a lost story from Bram Stoker around the time he was writing Dracula and that had elements of Dracula in it.
01:04So I was sitting there looking at the screen,
01:07wondering, you know, am I the only living person to have read this or has somebody else found it and they've been sitting on it?
01:12It was just an incredible experience and it's quite surreal now to be in, you know,
01:18Casino Merino, which is an opulent old building a few hundred meters from where Bram was born
01:24and
01:25standing beside a painting inspired by three of the characters from the story. So after I found it, I
01:33went with the transcription to an artist colleague, Paul McKinley, and
01:38we felt that we could do good work with this, that it could support a charity cause and that, you know,
01:44this could ultimately become a beautiful publication.
01:47We needed to verify the story with a Stoker expert. So we went to Paul Murray, who's
01:52my favorite of the Stoker biographers, and
01:55up to that point, I'd done extensive literature searches to see was there any evidence of it and I couldn't find any trace and
02:04Paul Murray confirmed that this wasn't a known story from Bram and that
02:09it had, in fact, been lost and it had sat in the archives for over 130 years.
02:14Gibraltar is very significant in terms of Bram Stoker's development as a writer.
02:19It is published in 1890 and that's the year that Bram Stoker makes his first notes for writing Dracula.
02:26A very long evolution from the time Bram was a young writer in Dublin and
02:31I see Gibbett Hill as a way station on that route between the younger Bram and the Bram who will publish Dracula in
02:391897. As an artist, I'm always looking for a story or a narrative that I hang all my work about.
02:45When Brian sent me the story of Gibbett Hill, there was so much I could work with and there was so much
02:54stories within the stories that I could use as jumping-off periods.
02:58This story hadn't been read for 130 years. So I was making
03:02new images, new content for an old story. So I was almost
03:08coming at it fresh, coming at it anew, making something new or something that's been buried for so long.
03:15You
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