Tunesmith, tinsmith opens with news of a golden eagle in the Scottish Borders. From the very first page we are invited to question what is real and what belongs only in Jacques' fantasy-world.

'When I wrote that first page, I sensed that golden eagles would be seen here in the Borders sooner or later. I had seen one further west in the Southern Uplands and it was clearly only a question of time.

'Some weeks later I discovered that the hunch was quite right, but not for the reasons I had imagined. At the Berwickshire Show I met someone from the group which was reintroducing golden eagles, and he later confirmed that one or more of these had indeed been seen close to where I imagined it in the book.

'The show proved to be so delightful that I wrote about it in detail in Tunesmith, complete with the eagle-man, a huge bull, parades of vintage cars and tractors, the dog-show, the local hunt and of course the closing-act with a magnificent stirring performance from the Duns pipe-band. Lots of people will recognise themselves on those pages!'

Many details in the books are every bit as true, even if the locations and characters are fictionalised.

'Obviously I couldn't write about the precise location where I thought the eagles might one day nest, but I know the region well enough to make the habitat perfectly realistic in the novel.'

'It helps that I have had several surprise encounters with wild golden eagles, one of these in a spot where you would never expect it, really close to large numbers of people.

'Eagles are highly-intelligent birds and if they see an opportunity to snatch a meal from under the nose of people picnicking in the mountains which have been their home for thousands of generations, you may depend that this is exactly what they will do, for just as long as they can get away with it.'

'The only reason I happened to see that particular eagle is that I heard the warning-cry of its prey. The eagle had arrived and gone within three seconds. They don't hang about or wait for us to put them in a selfie.

'This was high in the Italian Alps, so the prey was not a hare or rabbit as it might be here, but something with a voice which carries much further.

'In some places, seeing an eagle is an everyday occurrence and the local mammals have to always be alert.'

'Here near the Tweed, from April until September you are much more likely to see an osprey, which I wrote about in Pilgrim. A local family of ospreys has been awe-inspiring for many of us in the last two years and in the book, Jacques gives a detailed account of the way the female protected and educated her offspring.'

In Tunesmith, tinsmith, after watching a male osprey catch a fish somewhere not too far from Berwick, Jacques talks of a possible nest-site close to the Tweed. Here, as in certain other places in the books, life tends to imitate Art.

'I have been watching birds of prey since the beginning of the sixties, so I suppose that without even being systematic about it, I have gradually acquired a sense of their behaviour-patterns, and sometimes of where they might be nesting when I see them hunting the same patch of ground day after day.

'Since the books have a recurring theme of past, present and future all being linked in a vast network, it was wonderful to find that Jacques' prediction early on in Tunesmith, tinsmith was only a few hundred yards off the mark! Yes, indeed, those ospreys really were already nesting in this part of the Tweed Valley, but I had to wait until the year after writing Tunesmith to discover the nest...just in time to fictionalise it all in Pilgrim.' 

'Where I used to live in the Pyrenees, most days in the summer you can see griffon vultures, sometimes as many as sixteen circling low over the town. The choice of leading-bird for the third volume in the trilogy was always obvious, though I have decided to change the location for the final scene!'

Detailed background information on all of the novels is available upon request.