Country Girls by Anna Fox

Sites of horror, be they buildings, towns or landscapes, carry their difficult pasts forward. Mnemonic vestiges (like ruins and mounds), word-of-mouth stories, tours, books, paintings and films all contribute to the making of a myth. And while terrifying fact gradually shifts towards more innocuous folklore, perhaps a sinister undercurrent remains more present than one can fully know.

For Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp, growing up in and around the town of Alton in the 1970s, a lingering chill hung over Flood Meadows, a bucolic corner of rural Hampshire. The legacy of the gruesome 1867 murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, whose body parts were gradually found scattered across the meadows, lingered on – over one hundred years later – in a current threat of violence, in the adolescent fights and misogyny all around them.