The Dead of Rannoch Moor by Marty Ross

When they went up to the moors that day, they sure got a big surprise…

WARNING: This audio production contains graphic sex and violence throughout. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Dramatist Marty Ross, whose ‘Sleeping Beauty’ play I also directed for Audible, has written his first audiobook – a gleefully gruesome tale set on the Scottish moors, in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. A disparate group of disgraced redcoats are ordered to escort some Edinburgh surveyors on a mission to map the barren landscape of Rannoch Moor. But the Moor is not as empty as it first appears…

Following the Jacobite rebellion, the British Army did decide to start accurately recording the terrain they had been fighting in. This was the origin of the British Ordnance Survey map series, which is still going strong today. Marty took this fact as inspiration for his gothic horror story, in which the Moor makes the soldiers pay in blood for their war crimes. To show the universally dehumanising effects of warfare, his Redcoats come from all over the British Isles. This meant that the narrator, Chris Reilly, had to employ a huge range of regional accents – Highland Scots, Lowland Scots, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Gaelic, Geordie, Liverpool, Midlands, Belfast, London, Yorkshire, Manchester, Nottingham, Wales, Cornwall and aristocratic English. His extraordinary performance sounds like a cast of 30 actors rather than a one-man show. The legendary Shirley Henderson plays the Highland women the men encounter on the moors…who may not be quite what they seem…

‘The Dead of Rannoch Moor’ is an Enhanced Audiobook, fully sound-designed in Dolby Atmos by Joe Richardson and with an original score composed by Electra Perivolaris. It is a violent, gruesome and scary tale – definitely one to listen to on headphones and NOT in the car! But you will find yourself rooting for the unfortunate Captain Shawwood and his unruly troop of crooks, bullies and scallywags, despite their shady pasts, as the Highlands wreak their revenge on the bloodsoaked hilltops.

This project was a real challenge to direct and I enjoyed myself very much. Which is a bit worrying…