Author goes back in time for new book

In Hay Before the Bookshops or The Beeman’s Family Bridget Ashton sets out to recall, from the perspective of her girlhood self, what Hay-on-Wye (located on the Welsh side of the Welsh/English Border in the county of Powys) was like in the 1940s and 50s – with trains, a half-ruined castle, and a cinema.

‘The Beeman’s family’ lived in Market Street, off Castle Square. How did they come to be there? What was family life like in those frugal times?

Bridget has written one local history book after another about Morpeth, covering the yards and alleyways, the drovers and the workhouse.

She took the reader with her as she travelled over the hills with the drovers, with the monks of Newminster as they took their flocks to the Cheviots and with the pregnant girl as she entered the workhouse.

Her work also included tracking down the origins of the girls who were sent to marry one de Merlay baron after another over 200 years – Juliana from Dunbar, Ada from Fife, Alice from Yorkshire and Isabel from Wark on Tweed.

Finally, as Isabel produced only daughters, the de Mer-lay dynasty came to an end.

As a young woman in the 1960s, Bridget travelled alone, on foot, hitchhiking behind the Iron Curtain. This is the subject of her forthcoming book.

For more information about her new book and to purchase it, go to https://bridgetashton.ampbk.com