Merrily Watkins Companion Books in Order

The Merrily Watkins Companion line revolves around a single, much-loved volume: Merrily’s Border, Phil Rickman’s guide to the real places behind his fictional exorcist. It is part travel book, part folkloric scrapbook and part set of author’s notes, written for readers who have begun to suspect that the series’ strangest details might just have roots in reality.

Working with photographer John Mason, Rickman takes you through Herefordshire and the wider Welsh Marches – the ridges and river valleys where his stories live. The book visits churches, hillforts, pubs, standing stones and out-of-the-way lanes, many of them appearing under different names in the Merrily novels. Against Mason’s atmospheric images he sets short essays about how each location fed into particular scenes or plots.

Some chapters focus on big, resonant themes. There are sections on the Green Man carved in medieval stonework, on the Knights Templar and their round churches, on apple lore and cider rituals, on the legends behind black dogs and haunted bridges. Others are more anecdotal, recalling odd snippets from local history, half-forgotten newspaper stories or conversations with people who know the ground far better than any map does.

What comes through is how closely the fiction hugs the landscape. The ruined abbeys and decaying houses of the novels, the bleak lay-bys and misty hill roads, all have real-world counterparts, often with their own unsettling tales. Rickman is frank about where he has altered things for the sake of story, but he rarely invents a superstition or pattern of belief from scratch.

For fans planning a trip, Merrily’s Border can be read as an invitation to go exploring with the book in hand, tracing Merrily’s routes along the Wye or up to Garway Hill. For armchair readers, it deepens the pleasure of the series by showing how the fictional exorcist’s world overlaps with the churches, farms and border towns you could walk into tomorrow.

The result isn’t an academic study so much as a friendly, slightly eerie field guide: an insight into how one writer turned a stretch of countryside into a fully imagined haunted territory.