The Last Remains - Facts

 In this novel the remains of a girl are found. The girl, Emily, was from Lincoln originally. 

Her body is found in King's Lynn, Norfolk. King's Ly,nn, known until 1537 as Bishop's Lynn and colloquially as Lynn, is a port and market town in the borough of King's Lynn and West Norfolk in the county of Norfolk.

Ely is where Emily was last seen. Ely is a cathedral city and civil parish in the East Cambridgeshire.

Emily and some of her fellow students spent a weekend in Grime's Graves and then she went missing. Grime's Graves is a large Neolithic flint mining complex in Norfolk. It was worked between c. 2600 and c. 2300 BC, although production may have continued through the Bronze and Iron Ages and later, owing to the low cost of flint compared with metals. 

When Zoe and Ruth visit Lincoln, they talk about the Magna Carta and Lady Nicola de la Haye. 

Magna Carta Libertatum, commonly called Magna Carta or sometimes Magna Charta, is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. In the 21st century, four exemplifications of the original 1215 charter remain in existence, two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral.

Nicola de la Haie (born c. 1150; d. 1230), of Swaton in Lincolnshire, (also written de la Haye) was an English landowner and administrator who inherited from her father not only lands in both England and Normandy but also the post of hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle. On her own, she twice defended the castle against prolonged sieges. After the death of her second husband in 1214, she continued to hold the castle until she retired on grounds of old age in 1226. On 18 October 1216, she was also appointed sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John.

Ruth tells Zoe that as a child she went to Eltham Palace, which got her interested in history. Eltham Palace is where Henry VIII grew up. 

The cafe where Emily's remains are found is called the Green Child. The name is based on a legend of two children who appeared in a village called Woolpit in Suffolk. They were bright green. The legend of the green children of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, sometime in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen (r. 1135–1154). The children, found to be brother and sister, were of generally normal appearance except for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an unknown language and would eat only raw broad beans. Eventually, they learned to eat other food and lost their green colour, but the boy was sickly and died soon after his sister was baptized.

Other legends are mentioned throughout the book. 

East Somerton is a church in which a witch was buried alive. Dating from the 15th-century, St Mary’s went from serving its own parish to becoming part of the larger parish of West Somerton that served Burnley Hall. It finally fell into disuse in the 17th-century.  Since then, the church has remained abandoned, left for nature to reclaim with the forest seemingly devouring its stones. The most striking feature is in the center of the ruins, a tree known as “The Witch’s Leg.” This thin oak tree is said to be the work of a local witch, stemming quite literally from the witch herself. According to legend, during the height of England’s witch trials, a suspected witch was buried alive in the church. The buried witch, in her suffering, is said to have enchanted her wooden leg to sprout a tree that would destroy the church above. The legend goes on to say that if anybody were to walk around the tree three times, the witch’s spirit would be released.

Another legend tells that if you say 'Bloody Mary' at St George's in Yarmouth, Mary Tudor's face appears. At St George’s church in Great Yarmouth, there was a legend that claimed that if you ran round the 18th century churchyard three times without stopping and then shouted ‘Bloody Queen Mary!’ the face of Mary Tudor would appear at the nearest window. 

Another legend is of the fairy cow, about a creature which appeared in South Lopham. In  times of great hardship the cow will appear in South Lopham and stay until the cloud of distress lifts from the village. Once there was a deadly drought. Crops withered and people went hungry. Until the Fairy Cow appeared, and offered her sweet creamy milk freely. When rains came at last, the magical beast stamped down on a slab of sandstone, burning the imprint of her hoof in the rock and vanished without trace.

In the book we learn that Norfolk has the oldest human footprints outside Africa,  found in Happisburgh. The Happisburgh footprints were a set of fossilized hominid footprints that date to the end of the Early Pleistocene, around 950–850,000 years ago.

When Cathbad goes missing, one place they visit is the church where the hand of St Etheldreda is. The modern relic of Saint Etheldreda, consisting of her left hand, was found preserved in a separate reliquary, hidden in a priest’s hiding hole in a house in Sussex in about 1811.A small part of the hand of St. Etheldreda was returned to the parish in 1950, given from St Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place, London where it had been honoured. But the main relic had remained with the Dominican sisters at Stone.

Another place Judit visits is the Slipper Chapel. The Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham,[3] informally known as the Slipper Chapel or the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, is a Catholic basilica in Houghton Saint Giles, Norfolk.

Ruth also visit St Mary's Houghton-on-the Hill. The tiny church of St Mary, Houghton on the Hill in a remote corner of rural Norfolk dates from around 1090 and was abandoned in the 1930s. In 1982 it was 'uncovered' from its fetters of ivy and brambles by one man who turned the church and its garden into what has been frequently described as a haven of peace and beauty. Step inside and be captivated by the paintings on all four walls of the nave, paintings which codate the church and are some of the earliest and best in the country.

Ruth and Nelson finally move to Old Hunstanton. Old Hunstanton is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk.