Hello and welcome to the final mini episode in my Atlas of Deadly Plants miniseries.

And in this episode, I'm going to tell you a ghost story, a short personal ghost story of my own.

As a little way of rounding off this series of minisodes and appropriately it's a little

tale for Halloween it really is short and sweet and I do hope you enjoy it so let's go on with

the story.

As a child, I grew up in Amersham, which is a town in the home county of Buckinghamshire.

And that just means one of the counties around London.

And in fact, my town had a direct link to London via the Metropolitan Line,

the underground railway that extended out into the countryside

with Amersham at the end of the line.

Now, like most places in England,

we had our own fair share of ghost stories and spooky hauntings that happened in the area.

Indeed, I'm sure there were some hauntings linked to a road called Gore Hill, which were supposedly named after a battle with Danish invaders that produced so much

bloodshed that the gore, the blood, literally ran down the hill. I also used to walk my dog in a field

that was home to the martyr's memorial. The memorial was actually a large stone obelisk, but the place

where the martyring happened was always in my knowledge, as told by local people, about 100 yards away in the field. An oblong of ground in an arable

field that was completely different from the rest of the field. It was an indentation in the

ground with just weeds and overgrown grass growing there,

never cultivated because it was believed that crops wouldn't grow there

on the site of this place where people from the town were burned to death for their religious beliefs.

And indeed it's a matter of historical record

that some of these people's children

...