IT is impossible to live in Ilkley without being affected by the Moor, defining the southern horizon, its brooding presence looming over the town.

Even a smattering of local history tells you that many of the town's older buildings are made from stone hauled down the moorside on quarry tracks that still scar its green slopes, if you know where to look.

And if it wasn't for the supposedly curative waters springing from the upland soil, Ilkley would not have become the Victorian spa that helped swell the town to its present size.

Even today, much of the tourist trade is fuelled by those wanting to venture up onto the famous moor.

Then, of course, there's that inescapable song.

The relationship between town and moor has

fascinated me since my wife and I moved here in the summer of 1995.

It was a curiosity that grew as I trekked the

network of tracks that pattern the hillside, learning from the hikers' handbooks' of the area's physical and mythological history.

Ilkley Moor, or Rombalds Moor, to be accurate, is an atmospheric place of awesome beauty and rich legend.

For an author, this is a seductive mix and it wasn't long before my mind turned over the

beginnings of the idea for a book set here, in my adopted home town.

Okay, okay, let me explain.

Some years ago I saw a TV documentary about a chap who gave up his job to live in a camper van n the shores of Loch Ness so he could devote his life to proving the existence of the monster.

His story lodged in a deep recess of my brain,

surfacing again when reports began to circulate of a big cat - possibly a Puma, or a Black Panther -

terrorising livestock in the Cornish countryside.

So there was my dramatic situation, (the existence or otherwise of a beast), and there was my hero (the obsessive, reclusive seeker of the beast).

For a setting, I chose Rombalds Moor and its

environs.

Because it was handy. Also because of the Moor's many 'earth mysteries' associations: UFO sightings, alien abductions, fairies, spectral boggards, wild black hounds, strange rock markings and stone circles, a buried sword with magical powers, even the landscape-altering strides of Giant Rombald himself.

All of this fitted perfectly with the book's themes of science versus superstition, and the role of myth and belief in helping mankind to make sense of the world.

I don't identify Ilkley in the book.

To lend the novel a sense of universality, I

decided not to name the town or the moor at all. They are simply 'the moor', 'the town'.

Locations where specific scenes take place are assigned fictitious names: Cow and Calf rocks become Sun and Moon Rocks, the Doubler Stones, near Windgate Nick, become the Toadstool Stones; Farnhill Moor, above the Leeds-Liverpool canal near Kildwick, becomes Tumblejack Hill; Otley Chevin becomes the Crags. The Twelve Apostles keep their name, as does Via Calvaria - the woodland oratory adjacent to Middleton Lodge.

Readers familiar with the area will recognise the disused railway wagon, once a shooting hut, on Burley Moor.

And the central character's nickname of The Hermit is an obvious allusion to the 19th century hermit who lived in a hovel above Burley Woodhead, where a pub is named after him.

Ethan, my hermit, lives in a caravan roughly where Silverwell Cottage stands on the real Ilkley Moor, overlooking Heber's Ghyll.

A pivotal moment in researching the novel came during a guided tour of Ilkey Moor led by well-known Wharfedale ufologist, Nigel Mortimer.

His impressive demonstration of dowsing, with L-shaped rods and with a pendulum - gave me the idea for my second main character, a quirky young dowser called Chloe, who befriends Ethan, using her skills to help him in his quest.

Now there was a human relationship at the heart of the story.

Chloe works in the caf facing onto a Pay and Display car park that was once the town's market square.

She has moved here after several months as an eco warrior, living in a protest camp on wooded slopes to the north of the town where - you guessed it - there were plans to build a bypass.

I do not mention wheelie bins in the novel. Nor do I refer to the state of the town's public toilets. Contemporary fiction, I think, is not ready for these issues.

So this is, and is not, a book about Ilkley.

In common with many authors, I have tampered with the real world to suit the purposes of the make-believe one I wished to create.

Ironically, I became even closer to the actual town and its moor during the research that sustained the writing of the novel's imagined realm.

I hope something of the affinity I feel for the place can be discerned beneath the invention.

l Black Cat is published by Viking on October 5 at £9.99. Martyn Bedford will be launching the novel with a reading at Waterstones bookshop, Bradford, at 7pm on Wednesday, October 4.