An interesting aspect of the Jinny at Finmory books is the supernatural element. Jinny often gets drawn into aspects of Celtic superstitions which leads her to have nightmares and premonitions.

The Night of the Red Horse:

Jinny starts having nightmares following a visit from people doing an archeological dig on a site further up the moors from Finmory, they’re interested in a mural of a red horse on Jinny’s bedroom wall and they want to take a look at it but then dismiss it as being of no interest to them.

The power of the mural is foreshadowed in the first book, For Love of a Horse as Jinny paints a picture of Shantih running free on the moor and pins it up on the wall opposite the mural after seeing her in the circus. The day after this, Shantih escapes from the circus vans after a road accident and runs free on the moors.

The farmer, Mr MacKenzie tells Jinny about how his grandmother used to work at Finmory house and she brought him to watch an old tinker lady (travelling folk) chant whilst a “young lass with red hair” painted the mural- so again we see a foreshadowing that Jinny has a supernatural connection with the mural and the Red horse.

In The Night of the Red Horse, Jinny and her friend Sue visit the dig but Jinny is very unsettled by it and starts having nightmares featuring the Red Horse in the mural in her bedroom.

Her friend Nell who owns a gift shop in Inverberg who sells the Manders pottery along with Jinny paintings takes her to visit the Wilton Collection, which is a small museum of various artefacts including a Celtic statue of the pony goddess Epona. Jinny goes into a trance looking at the statue and utters “not one but One” but she is unable to say when asked what she meant.

Jinny continues to experience nightmares and when her family all leave her own at Finmory on her own for various reasons… Sue comes to stay with her for the night.

Jinny hears Shantih galloping around in her field and goes to see what she is up to but not finding her headcollar on its usual peg she puts her bridle on instead and as if in a dream, jumps onto Shantih’s back and Shantih gallops off across the moor, she obviously knows where she’s going so Jinny doesn’t try to stop her.

Eventually they reach a hollow near to where the archaeological dig has been taking place, however they seem to have gone back in time. They ride up to an alter where two statues are being fired. One is the Epona statue that Jinny saw at the Wilton Collection and the other is of an Arab Stallion. Shantih gallops home and an exhausted Jinny takes her bridle off and collapses into bed. The next morning, Jinny dismisses the whole thing as a dream but then finds some odd smelling leaves in Shantih’s mane.

To conclude this story, Jinny goes back to dig in daytime and Shantih leads her to where the Arab Horse statue is buried and she finds it. She realises that she is not meant to give the statue to the archaeologists but she still continues to have her nightmares. So what IS she meant to do with it? It finally hits her after a disastrous attempt to hide it in an abandoned quarry on the moor. “Not one but ONE”, she’s meant to bring it to the Wilton Collection to reunite it with the Epona statue. If the archaeologists had found that would never have happened. Of course, once she realised this the nightmares stop.

This is an amazingly imaginative story, and I was wowed by it when I first read it but it is possibly a bit scary for more sensitive younger readers.