But for Rolt, it is not so much the machinic automatism of the industrial age that gives birth to the horror but rather the disturbance of a prior site of numinous power. It could be argued that Rolt was one of the first edgelands writers, as his stories hone in on those sites where human industry abuts nature. In some ways this simply throws the horrors in his stories into a sharper relief because he writes often of malign agencies that haunt the sites of such industry: railways, mines, canals, and so on. Rolt himself was an historian who wrote biographies of some of the leading figures of the industrial revolution and he was also an engineer, classic cars enthusiast and a railways and canal preservationist, so his love of the technics of industry is well attested. The ghost stories of LTC Rolt are less well known than those of MR James and are in some respects a little derivative of the master but they deserve to be read for the way that they depict a sinister, supernatural presence in the industrialised landscape.
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