Living in an English industrial town, over fifty years ago, was a certain small boy. Since his father was away in the Air Force and his mother worked in a law office, he was rather a lonely small boy. So he began delving into books and poring over atlases. Way out in the North Atlantic ocean, he found an island named Rockall. No one seemed to own it, which was surprising at that time of great colonial empires. His books didn't tell him anything about it.

Eventually he learned that some folk gave the name Rockall to a lonely rock west of Ireland, but by that time he knew they were wrong. Rockall was no tiny rock, but a group of islands almost half as big as Australia. But, though rich in minerals - or perhaps because it was so rich in minerals - Rockall kept itself to itself. Foreigners were not welcomed and its people did not travel much.

They had their own way of life, quite different from the rest of the world, and they intended to preserve it from intruders.

However, the letter the small boy sent to the Rockalese embassy in London was so enthusiastic, and his follow-up correspondence so rich (with the remarkably accurate illustrations and accounts of Rockall you see on this page), that an exception was made. Nowadays Antony Swithin, true name of that boy, has easy access to Rockall. Alone among non-Rockalese citizens, he has become one of its leading scholars. he has made his own maps of it, he has mastered its special languages and alphabets; and he has begun writing its history, basing this on such works as the long series of Sandastrian Books of the Years.

In them he has found the records of two other boys who made their way, willingly or unwillingly, to Rockall. One of them was called Simon Branthwaite whose tale begins at the beginning of the fifteenth century. A story Swithin begins to tell in the first book of
The Perilous Quest for Lyonesse .