Dragon Hill by Terry Flaxton and Caroline Harrington
Dragon Hill is a darkly comic tale about the rights of people to live where, and how, they choose. It is set in an idyllic corner of the English countryside, a village bordered on one side by lush agricultural land, and on the other by a wooded escarpment known as Dragon Hill. It is a magical place (quite literally for some people) and the right to be there, to own (or not to own) a piece of it, is what drives all the principal characters. Juno is a traveller, who arrives at Dragon Hill, where a number of other travellers have established a makeshift settlement. They are an ill-assorted crew of eccentrics, idealists and society’s rejects, whose solidarity as a group is extremely tenuous, frequently threatened by arguments over ideology, ownership, and whose turn it is to wash up. And their presence divides the village residents, causing dismaying cracks to appear in the everyday veneer of civilisation. But Juno is a bridge-builder, and for a while it looks as though, through her influence, the communities may manage to co-exist. Things begin seriously to unravel when a death in the village opens up the possibility of the travellers gaining ownership of the land they inhabit. The last shreds of civilised behaviour are tossed aside, and old antagonists form new alliances, in an increasingly desperate and unscrupulous effort to dislodge the travellers. And Juno, the peacemaker, finds herself at the epicentre of the storm. Who will win the battle for this little bit of England? Can the rival communities ever live in harmony? And must Juno keep moving on, or has she reached the end of the road?