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!'

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 be sure that this is exactly what they will do, when they can get away with it.'

'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 three years and in the book, Jacques gives a detailed account of the way the female protects and educates 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 many other places in the books, life tends to imitate Art.

'Since the books have a constant 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.

'Two weeks ago I was watching an osprey while waiting for a green light at road-works near Melrose. In some ways, at least, Nature is bouncing back!'

'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.

'This year countless signs have been guiding my journeys. By just happening to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, I saw a male vulture landing at a nest hidden in a crevice only yards from where I work in the spring. This perfect timing allowed me to watch the birds over many weeks.

'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!'

In April this year, the Pyrenean eagles and vultures took Percy Stewart on a long journey of discovery which led to a chance meeting many weeks later in a Lourdes street, from which has come an unexpected sequel to the Tunesmith Trilogy.

'In the first sentence of the first book, I had unkowingly laid the beginning of a wonderful trail which leads all the way to the end of book four.  That one is now being edited, and I wonder where the road will take me next!

'Book four has almost written itself. At a delightful dinner for two in Lourdes, a new friend told me that she was raised by two cats. It had to be the title for book four, and now the trilogy has a sequel!'