standard livery colours for British Rail Inter-City trains. Allusions On Christmas Eve 1643, during the civil war, Barthomley was the scene of a massacre. About 20 Parliamentary supporters had taken refuge in St Bertoline's Church when Royalist forces under the command of Lord Byron started a fire. The Parliamentarians surrendered but twelve of them were then killed. The site of Mow Cop is not particularly isolated as there is a village around the hilltop. The nearby A34 is a former Roman road. The Mow Cop Castle folly was built in 1754 to look like a ruined castle. Rudheath is near Northwich. Approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) southeast of this is an area called Rudheath Woods, near the villages of Allostock and Goostrey. There is a caravan park outside Allostock, with nearby lakes, as described in the novel. Garner lives in Goostrey. Inspirations A 1975 lecture by Garner entitled "Inner Time" is concerned with engrams, experiences which remain in our subconscious and continue to affect us. Garner mentions repeatedly recounting a trauma to his psychiatrist to "release" it. The repetition of events over time is one of the main themes of Red Shift. Garner goes on to explain how memories form their own sequence, independent of chronology (hence "inner time"): “any two intensely remembered experiences[...] will be emotionally contemporaneous, even though we know that the calendar separates them by years.” He explains that this idea informs the structure of the novel. As for the plot, in the same lecture Garner stated that Red Shift is an "expression" of "the story of Tamlain", although critics have had some difficulty with the comparison. He also documents, in his introduction to the 2011 New York Review of Books edition, several unrelated bits of "compost" which inspired his novel. The first is the well-documented massacre at the parish church in Barthomley in 1643, the facts of which haunted Garner, a lifelong resident of the area, for some time. Next came a news article about a young couple; after a serious fight culminating in a break-up, the young man had given the woman a taped message in which he apologised but said if she did not care enough to listen to it within a week, he'd kill himself. She did not listen to the tape and he made good on his threat. Later, Garner heard a local legend that Mow Cop was first settled by a