Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.
Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”
