Some doors were locked for a reason. Josh Ruddle is thirteen, homesick, and the least promising cadet at the WraithAir Military Academy: a boy billeted in a Scottish village so small the maps cannot be bothered with it, on the edge of a moor the locals will not cross after dark. Then a man steps out of thin air on the crown of the moor - burning, three centuries out of his own time - and dies at Josh's feet with a warning nobody can translate. Something has torn a seam in the world, and something is coming through it. To close it, Josh must go the other way: back to 1726, to a Scotland of mud and lantern-light, where a beloved village doctor named Snell is quietly buying up the land above a well that has burned since before the first star. Doctor Snell is not who he says he is. Neither, as it turns out, is the boy waiting at the other end. Beneath the heather Josh finds a laboratory that has no business existing, two friends whose own histories will not survive close inspection, and a robot who does not respire, perspire or expire and would like that noted. What he does not find is anyone he can safely tell. Josh Ruddle and the Mystery Beneath the Moor is Book One of the Lochrihannish Trilogy: a time-slip adventure for readers of ten and up. Funny, fast, and genuinely frightening in the right places, with real science and real history underneath it. More of what happens in 1726 is true than you would expect. SECOND EDITION. This is a substantially revised and retitled edition of the novel previously published as What Lurks Beneath the Moor. The story has been rewritten throughout and the text differs considerably from the earlier version.