Imagine a cabin perched on a hill, looking down into a valley where a river flows, with mist hanging over it. Sheep graze on the fields of torn fields – emerald, lime, bile. This squat house, with auras and leatherette sofas that cling to your feet, promises escape and freedom, isolation and solitude.
Three years ago, I decided to write a gothic novel. I had thought about the design plan, but I knew that the location would be the key to its development. Landscape is a character in this genre as a mysterious hero or a naive hero. The space sets the tone. It does heavy lifting, builds tension.
I was looking for a plot for my first book, Driving Seatbeing exposed for a few months in a place that offered as much threat as beauty and so I returned to Perthshire, Scotland.
It has a special place in my heart – it’s where I got engaged, it’s where I took my kids during the unusually hot summer when lockdown restrictions were lifted. This Great Woodland – with more than 200,000 hectares of woodland and 50 lochs – is the gateway to the Highlands, where thousands of trees surround the beauty of Loch Tay and Scone Palace, the crowning place of the Scottish kings.
Divided by the Highland Boundary Fault, Perthshire’s landscape also includes the Grampian Mountains, and the great Rannoch moor. These wild areas lower the population density to only 29 people per km2. It was the amazing situation I needed.
This book required certain key locations: my antagonist’s home; a fluffy pile for an invisible marchioness; and, above all, it is the scene of the novel’s crisis.
I rented Castle Peroch, a beautiful 19th-century stone house on the 6,500-acre Kinnaird Estate, seven miles outside Dunkeld and overlooking the Tay valley.
It was perfect: beautiful and comfortable but with a magical feel. As night fell, I was running around the bathroom closing the curtains, with that line from Withnail replaying in my head. These are the types of windows that look like. I imagined the faces looking in and the letters hanging ominously on the door, the gravel outside – of course, it was just my husband coming back from Dunkeld Fish Bar for dinner. But what if it wasn’t? This was the perfect home for my boyfriend, a place that would make him question his own insanity.
That closed summer, we walked from the cottage to Loch Skiach, sprawling over the hillside, low-flying shards skimming its anthracite waters. We spent hours up there under the blazing sun, sitting by the picnic table outside both with our sandwiches and Tunnock’s Caramels, our bottles of Irn Bru, shouting for silence just because we could. It was part of heaven.
When I returned there in October a few years later, I pictured my protagonist fleeing the chaos of his life in London for a new start in this idyll.
A legacy of centuries of clan wars and wars of independence is the proliferation of castles across Scotland, from medieval ruins to mighty piles. I visited Glamis, of Macbeth fame, to Angus for inspiration, but it sounded too bad. Scone Palace near Perth, the original home of Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, was very much a castle.
Blair Castle, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Atholl, was the feminine spirit I was looking for. Situated outside Pitlochry, the castle is unusual; it is white from the beginning – and there is something of a Swiss legend about it, because of its turrets and its castles. Its impressive grounds, including the spectacular Hercules Garden, sparkling with fountains, topiary, trees and ponds, as well as Britain’s tallest trees, were the perfect setting for intrigue, coincidence and misunderstanding.
Loch Tay, with its breathtaking views and eerie silence, will be the setting for the book’s climax. It’s only an hour from the A9 and Perth and just over two hours from Edinburgh, but it doesn’t feel far away.
When we returned to the stillness of October, it was just mud – the water and the sky were indistinguishable. However a few summers before that, it was hot; these went into the shallows at the east end of the loch by Kenmore.
As we drove around the south coast, the car was raining, I saw a sign that said The Falls of Acharn. A search on Google Maps revealed a place called Hermit’s Cave, whose visitors have included Robert Burns and Dorothy and William Wordsworth since it was built for the Earl of Breadalbane as a viewing platform for the falls in the 18th century.
We parked on the side of the road next to a phone box that doubled as a lending library, rowing boats lined the rail leading down to the site. We followed the path up to the cave, which opens onto a viewing platform overlooking a quiet, moss-covered waterfall and a magnificent waterfall, framed by tall trees. I pictured them all, all the idols. In a moment, I had my story.
The Driving Seat was published on 2 April in Berlin, £9.99
#Scotlands #land #big #trees #wild #amazing #wont #soul