Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who had any part in helping me to create the adaptation of this story, all through its years of evolution - actors, designers, stage managers, audiences. Your names are too numerous to mention. Special thanks, though, must go to Trevor - as if bagging the dedication were not enough - for, (so he claims) prompting me with the idea back in 1992. I am such a magpie when it comes to claiming other people’s brainwaves as my own that I can fully believe “it was all his idea in the first place...”

Thanks should go to the custodians who care for the special places in which the play was originally performed - The various staffs of Manx Heritage; English Heritage; The Ranger Service of the Wirral and The National Trust at Brimham Rocks - and especially the former warden, Peter Meese. Thanks to The Isle of Man Arts Council for throwing their full weight behind the play’s last (and often I think the best) incarnation at Peel in 2007.

With regard to this long-awaited publication, Trevor must, once-again-and-this-is-getting-tiresome, be thanked for convincing me of its merit. Thanks to David Stuart Davies for his generous advice and support and, last but by no means least, to my lovely wife, Jude, for helping me compile these pages and for pointing out the often glaringly obvious errors and inconsistencies. Thanks to her objective eye, I hope this book will be an entertaining read, as well as a reliable blueprint for a piece of highly enjoyable theatre.