Episode 84 – Bosworth Summit Pound

A Podcast to the Curious - The M.R. James Podcast

Ahoy there listeners! Be grabbin’ yer nautical gear for a cruise on the high seas of Leicestershire, with LTC Rolt and his story Bosworth Summit Pound. (Enough. It’s set on a canal – ed) What terrors might await us on England’s peaceful inland waterways? And just who digs a canal tunnel under an ancient graveyard anyway?

Story notes

• Thank you to our reader this week Tony Walker: you must check out his Classic Ghost Stories podcast and episode on this story. If you’d like to know more about his podcast, make sure you listen through to the end of our show for an exclusive trailer from Tony!
• Tom Rolt built Spitfires during WW2, and in 1944 had his first book ‘Narrow Boat’ published. It was a big success, and through it he made connections with the people with whom he would form the Inland Waterways Association, an organisation dedicated to preserving Britain’s canals and other waterways. He was actually expelled from this in 1951 after falling out with founding member (and fellow author of supernatural fiction) Robert Aickman (see this amusing plaque, which suggests the enmity lingered after both their deaths!).
• Rolt’s one volume of ghost stories ‘Sleep No More’ was published in 1948. Mike Ashley wrote of this, “Rolt had a formidable knowledge of the byways, waterways and railways of Britain which made Sleep No More (1948) a most unique volume of the supernatural”. Ashley adds that of MR James’s imitators, “Malden, Munby and Rolt achieve the most success in blending James’s techniques with their own narratives… Because of his ability to utilise original surroundings, L.T.C. Rolt’s stories are perhaps the most refreshing.”
• In another essay worth reading, Kai Roberts wrotes that “Rolt succeeds because the industrial setting he evokes is one about which he is passionate and knowledgeable.”