Beartown Tales

Children of Congleton have been given the opportunity of helping to write a wonderful new book

The Bear town story book was born after a competition was run in the schools of Congleton throughout 2009. The children were asked to write a story about the Congleton Bear based on the theme of the Bear disappearing from Congleton and making a journey.

The question they were asked to answer was ‘Where did he go and what did he do while he was making his journey?’

Over 300 children submitted stories for this competition and all of them were read meticulously to find our winners.

The next job was to read the stories again and pick out events that could be woven into a full length story from which the book could be created. Eventually a ‘map’ was made and the story begun.

A lot of the story was written by Deborah Cooper as she created a tale stringing together the isolated events picked out from the children’s stories.  But at the same time she has kept as closely as she can to the input from the children, and they should be able to recognise their own creations in the pages of this book.

The book will be produced next year complete with Deborah’s full colour illustrations and the money raised will go towards helping to ease the suffering of bears the world over.

The story starts when the Congleton bear, a descendent of the original bear that was bought in the 1600s, is asked to go and find this bear who has gone missing. The story is set in modern times so there is a fair degree of magic in this tale, particularly as the old bear would be about 400 years old by now! But then this is a tale written from the imagination of children, who always seem more in touch with magic than we do... The Congleton bear travels across Europe to India then up into Germany and finally finds the old bear to bring him home safely. On the way, amongst others, they meet the three bears, a dragon and various unusual people.

Watch this space for more news about the book as it develops, plus a chance to see a sample chapter with some of the illustrations. Once it’s printed you’ll be able to purchase it directly from this website as well as book shops. All of this information will be made available as soon as it can be... keep checking back with us.