"The Picts and the Martyrs" (1943) is the eleventh book in the much-loved "Swallows and Amazons" series by Arthur Ransome. This book like the first is set in the Lake District, but unlike most of the books does not have the Walker family in it. Instead Dot and Dick Callum arrive to stay in Beckfoot with the Blacketts, only to be not welcome at all when a stern Great Aunt decides Beckfoot needs her to look after it. So Nancy turns them into Picts living in hiding, while she and Peggy suffer nobly.

This is one of those great books in which nothing happens, yet everything happens. Dot and Dick live the life of outlaws from a Walter Scott novel. Through their eyes we discover how to catch trout barehanded. There are near escapes such as Dick having to hide in the armadillo box, or Nancy coming back from a night visit to the Callums. Every page is full of real detail about mining and the fells and sailing and skinning rabbits and life back then. It also is a refreshing refreshingly wholesome adventure, to put a sense of wonder back into the mundane. Reading this book is the next best thing to actually being inside its pages.

This is also one of the influences on the thoughts in my head. From this book I was infected with an interest in Picts and tribes and their history. Nancy has made a scarab flag for the Callums and that too pushed me towards Ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics and strange languages. There's even a precursor to my love of Adventure games in the contrivances Nancy uses to communicate like mowing messages on a lawn, or hiding messages in an arrow as she did in "Swallowdale".

This book also is an amusing story illustrating what happens when even for the right reasons we try to deceive. As in a farce things just keep getting more complicated. The game is almost up right at the end . . . but that would be telling.