Aldbourne was my first home. Following my birth in Swindon in 1975, my mother took my brother and me to live in a tiny toll cottage just outside the village. Both have told me that they experienced uncanny happenings in and around the cottage. It's certainly fairly remote, which lends the place a slightly eerie atmosphere.Four years before my birth, the village was the location for the classic Doctor Who serial 'The Daemons'. Within the narrative, written by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman under the pseudonym 'Guy Leopold', the village was named 'Devil's End', which indicates just how great a debt this era of the show owed to Nigel Kneale's Quatermass cycle.
In case you're not up on your Kneale, he set his 1958 TV serial Quatermass & The Pit in a fictional London district named Hob's End - 'Hob' being a Northern English colloquial term for 'Devil'.
