I thought I'd read this book as a child, but no - reading it to my daughter Celyn this week has convinced me that I just remember passages of it from drama classes in my primary school when I was very small.

Elidor was a priest who as a boy was led by dwarves to a castle of gold in a land that, while beautiful, was not illuminated by the full light of the sun. He knew he wanted to explore the imaginative realms inspired by the landscape and its secret history despite the direction in which his education was leading.This did give the book an old fashioned feel to it, and I think this is the reason it wasn’t popular in the library. Drawing on Welsh, Irish and English mythology, the book chronicles the trials and hardships of a group of young teenagers as they attempt to fulfill a prophecy from another world, and fight a terrible evil. Malebron is in desperate straits and asks the children to take all four treasures of Elidor, including his own spear, back to their world to hide them from the powers of evil.

The sound of air being torn like cloth burst on them, a dreadful sound that cracked with the force of lightning, as if the sky had split, and out of it came the noise of galloping hoofs. The Shakespeare quote is printed on its own page immediately before chapter one, and Roland, the youngest of three brothers and a sister, is the hero of this piece. This runs up against obdurate reality in the face of the other children’s cynicism about or fearful rejection of the otherworld experience.Although I think children’s books have evolved a lot since the time this book was written, but that doesn’t mean we should give older book a miss. Inside he is reunited with his brothers and sister who had, each in turn, tried to help Malebron but failed. The misbehaviour of the electrical objects in the Watson household becomes, according to this reading, a kind of poltergeist manifestation of Roland’s strong repressed emotion. According to the medieval legend, only the calming presence of a virgin can tame the wild and ferocious nature of the unicorn and only thus may it be killed.