RESEARCHING SETTINGS

 

One thing I love about writing is getting to know the places where I’ve set my novels. Often I use a fictitious house, town or village but set it in a real area I’ve visited and know well, that I can write about.

The Girl from Ballymor is set in the made-up small town of Ballymor located in the west of county Cork, Ireland. I love west Cork, and the town is a kind of mix of Skibbereen and Clonakilty. The hills in the novel are like those further west in the peninsulas, and the ruins of Kildoolin are based on a famine village on Achill Island, county Mayo.

The Drowned Village is based very closely on Mardale and the Haweswater reservoir in the Lake District. The geography and the mountains described are exactly Mardale – I just renamed everything.

People have asked me where the château described in The Secret of the Château is, and the answer is it exists only inside my head, but the village, mountains and valley are a sort of amalgamation of many such valleys in the Alpes Maritimes area of France, although the château itself is something you’re more likely to find in the Loire valley.

And The Stationmaster’s Daughter uses the real-life part-restored Lynton to Barnstaple railway, but transplants it to the Dorset coast.

Once I know an area well, I love writing about it, and I hope I can do a reasonable job of bringing it to life in my novels.

Lockdown has made things a little harder, to say the least. My current work in progress is partly set at Bletchley Park. When I decided to write this novel, I assumed I would be able to visit Bletchley, do the tour, and then be able to write from my own experience. But unfortunately due to the pandemic I haven’t been able to go there at all, so I’ve had to rely on my research using books and websites. There’s no shortage of pictures and lots of information about it – both as it currently is as a tourist attraction, and as it was during the war years – but nothing beats actually going there and seeing it for myself.

I’m currently under contract to deliver this novel plus two more over the next year. The other two I’ve pitched are both set abroad – one in France and one in Ireland. They’d be set in places I’ve been to several times (Chamonix and Dublin) but both are places I may not be able to get back to for some time, due to this blasted pandemic. Sigh.

There is a solution, that I might well go for – I have an idea brewing for a novel set right where I live now. We moved in December, to Mudeford, on the edge of Christchurch, Dorset. It’s a place with strong links to smuggling, back in the 18^th century, and there’s a part of me that’s always wanted to write a novel featuring smugglers...