Write of way: The landscapes that inspired our greatest literary works

Stonehenge and Tess Durbeyfield’s tragic fate, a Cumbrian lake echoing to Nancy Blackett exclaiming ‘Shiver my timbers’, the Yorkshire moors stalked by a vengeful Heathcliff — the infinitely varied English landscape has not only given impetus to writers’ imaginations, but, in places, has become defined by the books. These include Hardy, Brontë and Lorna Doone country, Dickensian London and Beatrix Potter’s Lake District, where Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Peter Rabbit scuttle about their business.

Fiction merges seamlessly with history, so that the reader may forget which came first: touristy Jamaica Inn (still standing) on bleak Bodmin Moor, titular setting for Daphne du Maurier’s 1936 novel after she was stranded in bad weather at the remote pub, really was once a nucleus of smuggling skulduggery; charming Oare church on Exmoor has become inseparable from R. D. Blackmore’s dramatic scene in which the violently jealous Carver Doone shoots Lorna on her wedding day. Brontë pilgrims trek to Top Withens, a ruined, isolated farmhouse on the Pennine Way four miles from the writers’ family parsonage at Haworth, for its association with Wuthering Heights as the inspiration for the Earnshaws’ home.

An unassuming airing cupboard at Jacobean Asthall Manor, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, where the gardens are open to the public, was a place of longing in fact and fiction: Linda Radlett and her siblings gathered in the Hons’ Cupboard in Nancy Mitford’s semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love, just as the writer and her sisters would recline on the shelves as they dreamed of running away or falling in love.

Moorland and madness

Open moorland, with glutinous bogs quivering to the treeless horizon and the wind whistling eerily, can be a frightening place: Wuthering Heights opens ominously with Mr Lockwood getting snowed in with his weird landlord, Heathcliff, and having a nightmare about a ghostly woman. All three Brontë sisters based their most famous stories on the moors. Charlotte wrote part of Jane Eyre when staying in the Peak District, adopting a nearby house, North Lees Hall, as Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall. Handily, it was owned by a widow named Mary Eyre, who recounted tales of an incarcerated mad woman.

Dartmoor, renowned for phantom hounds and skulking beasts, prompted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write perhaps the ultimate scary moorland story. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Watson, investigating reports of a ghostly dangerous dog, discover that it is terrifyingly real. Fog and an escapee from Dartmoor Prison — all realistic — add to the creepiness. Agatha Christie used a snow-bound Dartmoor — and a prisoner on the loose — for The Sittaford Mystery, in which a rich bachelor’s past catches up with him as he is lined up for a top government job.

Dartmoor and Exmoor have served well for wildlife fiction. The Ballad of the Belstone Fox (Belstone is a real Dartmoor village) by David Rook, a tale of the quid-pro-quo relationship between a huntsman and a rescued orphaned fox cub, ends painfully amid the bleak tors. Hound and quarry is at the centre of Henry Williamson’s best-known novel, Tarka the Otter, set on the rivers Taw, Torridge and Lyn of north Devon, where the author moved after the Second World War. Williamson, who also based Salar the Salmon there, understood well the nuances and realities of wildlife’s place in the countryside. Tarka is remembered with a sculpture in Bideford and has a local railway line and cycle path named after him.

The timeless traditions of the West Country are central, too, to Moorland Mousie (1929), a favourite of The Queen, in which Golden Gorse (real name Muriel Wace) tells the story of an Exmoor pony that has a much happier time going staghunting than pulling a grocer’s cart.

Drama on the Downs

Watership Down, where rabbits roam and racehorses gallop, is high on the North Wessex Downs in north Hampshire. The book of the same name evolved from the stories Newbury-born Richard Adams (he is buried at nearby Whitchurch) told his daughters on car journeys. Adams mentions other real places: Sandleford (a golf course), the River Enbourn, the 17th-century farmhouse Nuthanger and Newtown church. Publisher Rex Collings remarked: ‘I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits. Do you think I’m mad?’ Watership Down sold some 50 million copies.

Rather less bucolic is Stella Gibbons’s take on the Sussex Downs in Cold Comfort Farm, her interwar send-up of overwrought tales of rural life. The Starkadder family’s farm — home to Aunt Ada Doom and a bull called Big Business — sits on ‘a bleak hillside’ surrounded by fields ‘fanged with flints’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Downs loosely run from the South-West up to Oxford (for which read Christminster in Desperate Remedies and Jude the Obscure). Dorchester, county town of Dorset, is the titular town of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Bockhampton, where Hardy was born and is buried, is Mellstock, setting for Under the Greenwood Tree, Sherton Abbas is Sherborne (The Woodlanders), Slingers is the Isle of Portland (The Well-Beloved) and Budmouth in Far from the Madding Crowd is Weymouth.

The Berkshire Downs around Lambourn (known as the Valley of the Racehorse) is the atmospheric backdrop to several racing thrillers by former champion jockey Dick Francis, including Crossfire and To the Hilt, and his son Felix, who convincingly set his 2025 novel Dark Horse in the village. Mavis Cheek lived not far south-west of Lambourn; among her downland novels is the comic The Lovers of Pound Hill, which involved a rude West Country chalk figure.

The screenwriter William Nicholson, creator of Shadowlands and Gladiator, lives near his birthplace of Lewes, East Sussex, and has brought the South Downs to fictional life. His bestselling tale of village life and love, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, set in Edenfield (loosely based on Beddingham), was turned down by several publishers for being ‘too middle-class’. It was originally titled Countryville because: ‘We’re nearly all urbanites living in the countryside and often commuting to the city.’

Time and tide

The Cobb, Lyme Regis’s famous harbour wall, is often perilously slick with seawater. It was the undoing of Louisa Musgrove, as she slipped through Capt Wentworth’s hands and fell down in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. More than a century later, John Fowles (who lived in the Dorset town) made it a scene of wistful longing where Sarah Woodruff would brave the wind-tossed spray and prurient local gossip to stare out to sea in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Enid Blyton spent her holidays along the Dorset coast, on the Isle of Purbeck, where the Famous Five would ‘lie on heathery beds listening to sounds of the night’, smell honey-suckle and feast on ham rolls and ginger- bread, washed down by lashings of ginger beer — nearby Corfe Castle appears as Kirrin Castle; Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour is Whispering Island.

Only one village in the UK has an exclamation mark in its name: Westward Ho! on the north Devon coast. The village is named after Charles Kingsley’s tale of derring-do on the high seas; the expression originates from the call of water-taxi men on the Thames. Kingsley lived at Bideford when he wrote the book, his most successful, in 1855, describing the ‘wide expanse of hazy flats, rich saltmarsh’ in the estuary where the Taw and Torridge converge. He was said to be furious at the adoption of Westward Ho! as the name for a new resort.

Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ stories are forever associated with the Lake District, where he lived on and off and eventually died in 1967, but at one point he moved to Suffolk, to the banks of the River Orwell. Here, instead of reinventing local geography as he did in Cumbria, he began to cite real landscape features, illustrating the stories with maps. In We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea, the Walker children (the Swallows) are inadvertently left on a boat on the Orwell that slips its moorings and drifts out into the North Sea, ending up on the Dutch coast. As research, Ransome sailed his Nancy Blackett over to Flushing in the Netherlands.

Cornish cream

Cornwall’s mining history and wild cliffs and creeks redolent with smuggling history have reaped literary riches and lucrative filming deals. This is notably thanks to Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers (hugely popular in Germany), Susan Howatch’s Penmarric, Winston Graham’s ‘Poldark’ novels (each of which is subtitled A Novel of Cornwall) and the books of du Maurier, whose family bought a house in Fowey in 1926. ‘There was a smell in the air of tar and rope and rusted chain, a smell of tidal water… Here was the freedom I desired,’ she wrote in the non-fiction Vanishing Cornwall. Menabilly, du Maurier’s rented home near Polkerris, which had been deserted, was famously reinvented as sinister Manderley in Rebecca, Kilmarth, her final home a few miles away, became the backdrop for The House on the Strand, Frenchman’s Creek was named for an inlet on the Helford estuary where she spent her honeymoon and The Birds emanated from her observance of menacing seagulls. Pilgrimages by readers to ‘du Maurier country’ started in her lifetime and she was said to be dismayed by it — although that was how she met her husband, Frederick Browning, who read The Loving Spirit and was moved to visit its setting around Fowey: ‘Perhaps I’ll have the luck to meet the girl who has written it,’ he said.

A less-mentioned, Cornwall-centred novel is The Feast (1950) by Margaret Kennedy, a darkly funny story about the guests and workers in a north Cornish hotel, which becomes submerged by a collapsed cliff. It powerfully evokes the austerity of postwar seaside holidays at the same time as pre-empting 21st-century concerns about coastal erosion and it ensures that, as in all the best moral tales, the good people escape.

Moving west in the county, the contemporary writer Patrick Gale, who lives on a farm near Land’s End, often sets novels locally. These include A Perfectly Good Man, about a parish priest in the village of Morvah, and Mother’s Boy, a fictionalised account of the life of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, who lived in Launceston.

Middle England

Industrial Nottinghamshire, where the author grew up, is not what springs to mind first with D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, yet the contrast between the pleasant country estate and the struggles of inhabitants of an ugly coal-mining village adds to the steaminess. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was born at South Farm on the Arbury estate in Warwickshire, a rural idyll now surrounded by a tangle of motorways; Middlemarch, considered her masterpiece, is thought to be based in Coventry.

Bournville, a village outside Birmingham created in 1879 by the Cadbury brothers for their chocolate-factory workers, is where Jonathan Coe, who was born in the city, set his 2022 novel of the same name. It charts England’s history over the past 75 years, as seen through the eyes of a character based on his mother, culminating in the covid pandemic. Coe’s Middle England, also set in the Midlands, reflects topical national discontent away from London and is a riveting, and even-handed, account of the bitter divisions caused by the Brexit debate.

More rural stories of central England include Wild Lone: The Story of a Pytchley Fox by Denys Watkins-Pitchford, or ‘BB’, the Northamptonshire-born author, naturalist and artist; Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell’s gossipy, episodic novel based on the market town of Knutsford, Cheshire; and Mary Webb’s tenderly romantic Precious Bane, set in her home territory of rural Shropshire. Flora Thompson published her trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford, about changing village life in the late 19th century in her home territory of Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire during the Second World War. It was adapted as a play in 1978, described by our theatre critic Michael Billington as ‘one of those rare theatrical occasions with a genuine healing quality'.

London Rules

Charles Dickens’s humorously dark images of the capital — the muse he described as his ‘magic lantern’ — spawned an entire tourist industry and formed as much a character of his novels as Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit, Mr Pickwick and Ebenezer Scrooge.

The contemporary writer Mick Herron, who based Slough House, hideous workplace of the Slow Horses, at Aldwych for his series about failed spies, also sets mood by giving personality to the city. As with Dickens’s memorable ‘Fog everywhere’ riff from Bleak House (‘Fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats… fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper…’), Herron has snow ‘with a job to do, snow that would cause everything to grind to a halt’, dawn arriving in ‘safecracker’s gloves’ and howling winds sending empty crisp packets flitting down desolate alleys.

The Thames in all its guises — sinister, filthy, romantic — is a much-used character. Dickens’s final novel, Our Mutual Friend, opens with the slap of water against a boat as a father and daughter pull a body from the river to pilfer its pockets. A century later, Penelope Fitzgerald pre-empted the 1960s with her 1979 Booker winner, Offshore, about a community of houseboat owners at Battersea Reach, where the author herself lived on a barge.

Modern London’s diversity is rich meat for novelists, notably in John Lanchester’s Capital, about the ruination of a banker, and Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, on the cancellation of an art critic, both of which feature scammers. In Monica Ali’s satirically funny Love Marriage, first-generation Indian culture meets the in-laws in white Hampstead. Another closely observant author is Amanda Craig, whose new book High and Low, out last month, is set in north London where the local literati get stuck in a writers’ café as a terrifying riot spreads out from a local housing estate.

However, for a portrait of the capital as seen through an arrival’s eyes, look no further than Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear. He lived between Notting Hill and Maida Vale and enjoyed browsing in Portobello Road, pottering along the canal in Little Venice or causing chaos on the Underground and is immortalised by a statue in the train station where he met the Brown family.