A Buzzard Spotted over Ladmanlow

Summer's definitely here this time.  That talk of it being here in June was rather premature.  But I have been outside in brilliant sunshine today.  This afternoon I saw a buzzard over Ladmanlow.  A couple of weeks ago, I thought I had seen and heard a couple of buzzards, so this time I made careful note when I saw a large bird in the sky.
Dark brown, very open fan-tail, almost semi-circular, dark under the wings with flashes of pale colour.  I looked it up, yes, classic signs of a buzzard.
Buteo buteo - a common species my book says.  Strangely enough, whenever I spot something in my garden and look it up, it is always common.  Common lizard, common dragonfly, common common damselfly.  I like seeing them anyway, however common they are, I'm not a snob.
You may wonder what all this talk of modern day Ladmanlow has to do with Fleams.
Well, it started like this:

In 2011, we were house-hunting in North Derbyshire.  We became particularly fascinated with The High Peak area.  Eventually we bought a house, in a great rush to settle before my husband was off to work in Antarctica for six months.

That winter I set the house to rights and made myself and the children comfortable in it.

One day I cleared the loft and found a small chest of stuff that seemed to belong to a previous occupant, who by some bizarre twist of fate, was also called Kate Aimson.  Strange echoes were set off in my mind.  I had been named Catherine (after Cathy in Wuthering Heights), but had always insisted on being called Kate.  I had met and married a man with the surname Aimson.  Was it all by coincidence?  This material from the past was obviously meant for me.  I was meant to find it, a gift from the past to me in 2011.

The strange thing was that the house was completely brand new.  The estate was still being built as we moved in.  Last time I looked on Google Earth, it was still shown as a building site.  What were these books and papers doing buried under the vast layers of Energy Rating A insulation in the loft?

Firstly I went through the objects and artefacts, and I have made an art installation of them called “The Fleams Collection”, which you can see at The Green Man Gallery in Buxton.  I am now going through Kate Aimson’s papers, photographs and notes.  There seems to be the notes for nine chapters, or separate volumes, with a covering letter about The Book of Fleams.

I am now re-constructing this lost Book of Fleams, Kate Aimson’s missing masterpiece.