Moondial (Faber Children's Classics)

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When I was younger, that is to say, younger than I am now (11), this was one of my favourite books of all time. Now, I have 3: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Pride and Prejudice. I have always been a keen reader, so, when I was...7 or 8?...I read Moondial for the first time. And, again - who was Miss Raven and what truly was her objective? With just that little bit more, this book could have had full marks from me. Regardless, I did enjoy it, and will probably gladly reread it at some point. And I will read further works by this author, time and availability permitting. :)

Moondial (TV serial) - Wikipedia

Glad to read this article. I remember watching this at the time and have been to Belton House twice. I brought the dvd a couple of years ago as soon as I knew it was available. In her autobiography, Helen wrote ‘I played with words as other children play with Lego’. Her play with words began with poetry at age 6, later producing around 100 children’s stories including Moondial. After becoming a teacher, she returned to writing in 1963. Helen wrote early in the morning, with a pot of tea beside her. She would sit on the floor and write in a large plain book, with ‘real pens and real ink’. When writing Moondial, as with other timeless fantasies, she used a white pen with sepia ink. After writing between 500 and 3,000 words, she would then type up her work, while it was fresh in her mind. Helen never edited the content once it was written. The series was released on video in 1990, and reissued in 1995, but only in a shortened "movie edit". This was released on DVD in 2000, but has long since been deleted. The full episodic version was released in 2009 by Reader's Digest and later re-released on DVD by Second Sight in May 2015.

Most of the points I'm giving this book are from my childhood self - it was my favourite, and a book that really inspired my writing. It's so strange and atmospheric and mysterious. It features children from three different time periods – Minty of the 1980s, Tom from the 1860s and Sarah from the 1770s. Moondial, a ‘time shift within a time shift’ centres around the sundial in the gardens of Belton House. As 2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Moondial, an exhibition loaned by the Cresswell family has been on show in Belton House’s library.

Moondial Curious British Telly: Moondial

The narrative both in the novel and the adaptation doesn’t offer a clear resolution or straight-forward explanations and appears to deliberately leave us with a fair degree of ambiguity. Even director Colin Cant admits being puzzled by the scripts and having to explore their meaning further.David Ferguson’s theme tune and score is wonderfully ethereal, and he would go on to become a regular collaborator of director Colin Cant, the pair later working together on The Country Boy, Dark Season and Century Falls. Ferguson, unusually for BBC children’s productions of the time, wasn’t part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and operated on a freelance basis but his work has a very similar feel to the best of the Workshop. His music sounds timeless, not suffering at all from sounding like it comes from the 1980s, and not sounding as if it was crafted on the usual synthesisers. It is one of the finest aspects of this production and deserves a wider audience. Sadly, Ferguson passed away in just his mid-50s, so listeners were denied hearing any more of his excellent, talented work. a b The Moon's orbit is not circular, so it does not move around the Earth at a uniform rate. Thus while the average difference between moonrises is 48 minutes, the actual time can vary considerably (roughly 20min to 1hr50min depending on the time of year and the location of the Moon in its orbit). The time read by a moondial will also vary in a similar, though not so drastic manner. Even before she came to Belton, Minty Cane had known that she was a witch, or something very like it . . . Ariminta (Minty) Cane, reluctantly separated from her mother, stays with her Aunt Mary (Valerie Lush) in Belton, Lincolnshire and it isn’t long before the curiosity of the nearby Belton House and its mysterious Sundial leads her to cross the threshold of time and encounters ghostly presences who appear to be caught in the trappings of life as much as she is.

Moondial | Book reviews | RGfE - Reading Groups Moondial | Book reviews | RGfE - Reading Groups

Led on to the sundial, upon a strangely symmetrical journey resembling that of her dream which opens this six-part serial – and accompanied by the late David Ferguson’s magnificent score – Minty discovers its powers to be that of not just ‘apparent-time’ but also that of ‘moon-time’ and the dial spins her on course to the 19th Century where she meets a fellow time-traveller, a boy called Tom ‘short for Edward’ (Tony Sands). Children’s drama in this era was thought-provoking and intelligent, with real care and attention made during the productions. The BBC seemed to go to great lengths to produce high quality programmes that made children think, entertained them and which didn’t belittle them. Like most other drama of this period, Moondial was made entirely on videotape (with quite a bit of day-for-night recording too), but this doesn’t detract from the quality of the storytelling and the series still manages to stand up to scrutiny today. Cant resists the temptation to go overboard with special effects (which would undoubtedly date any production), with only minimal use of video effects. Even the day-for-night material has a slightly unsettling quality to it, due to the images having been slightly colour desaturated. Moondial’ (1988) is available on DVD from Second Sight Films, originally released 4 May 2015. BBFC classification PG. Running time 158 mins. Catalogue no. 2NDVD3274. The BBC made a children’s television programme of Moondial with Helen Cresswell writing the script. Her method had been to write the book first and to keep the television script faithful to the book. The six episodes were filmed at Belton House and village, with local children taking part. The series was broadcast from February to March 1988 and was repeated in 1990. A DVD of the series can still be obtained.Helen Cresswell is certainly one such hero. This is a novel reminiscent of Philippa Pearce's 'Tom's Midnight Garden', engaging with time slips and ghostly figures from the past and the future. Moondial, a children’s book written by Helen Cresswell, was jointly published in October 1987 by Faber and Faber and the National Trust. The story is set in 1985 Belton village and at Belton House. A legacy of Helen’s book is the Moondial Trail which she worked on with the Learning and Community officer at Belton House. The trail begins in the west courtyard, going through the entrance into the garden. School parties are encouraged to use their senses along the trail. Standing on the north terrace the path to the sundial lies ahead. Going through the church gate the trail reaches the icy corner of the tower and Tom’s headstone, before going onto the Orangery and the fountain in the pool of the Italian garden. This trail helps children experience the garden as the author and Minty did. A lovely little mystery with some beautiful symbolism and lovely morals about love being the most important thing. As another reviewer remarked Cresswell sometimes spends more time on the things you aren't interested in then skips over other moments you felt could have had more tension in such as the finale. Cresswell writes good characters and this was a good book which was deservedly made in to a TV series. It seems a shame that her name has fallen in to obscurity. Moondial was very much the final flurry of a very particularly and beloved strain of British children’s television that had mainly flourished in the seventies. There were attempts to revive it, some successful (Tom’s Midnight Garden and a couple of the Nesbit Five Children adaptations), some not (Archer’s Goon) and Century Falls (which as a child I recognised immediately as a cynical attempt to emulate this era and hated with a passion. But Moondial was the final masterpiece: strange, eerie, unsettling and genuinely spooky - and strangely far more so than the book that it was adapted from