Settings

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I love having a real place to set my books. It helps me see the story playing out if I know the place. I used real settings which I named in my first two books. A little tricky, because I was then bound to the real history of the place. I made freer with my Icelandic books. I knew the places, but I didn't name them. So I was free to visualise the bay and hillsides, but could play a little with them.

In Runaway, I needed a big stately home for my setting. I chose Dyrham Park, which was just the right era, built in the early Georgian period, but wary of my experience of using Farleigh Castle, I renamed it Deerhurst Park. Now I had all the freedom I could want, to explore the beautiful setting on visits and imagine it, but without tying myself to its actual history and the people who lived there.

I could imagine the horses and carriages travelling down the wide sweep of the carriageway into the picturesque park. I could place characters at the lodge house (now a ticket office). I could describe negotiating a team of horses through the sharp turn into the gates and the archway into the stableyard:

I even knew what the stable yard was like - though it's now a tea room and a shop; as mentioned in an earlier post:

Here, I was able to imagine tethering and grooming the horses, harnessing them, riding them in and out, even walking them when they had colic. And I could imagine and describe all the daily coming and going of a busy stable yard and the people who once worked there.

I even felt familiar with the gardens and the view of the back of the house, which the servants would have crossed to go to church on Sundays:

An image of Dyrham Park even made the back cover of the paperback. So it's an open secret, but I still got to invent my own people and story for the place. 

I'm sure other authors can successfully use imagined settings, but I definitely find real ones easier and more vivid. And it gives me an excuse to post all these lovely pictures. Perhaps the real secret is that when I visit these incredible places, I love to imagine what it must have been like to live there. I suspect that might be the basis of a lot of our historical fiction.

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A Lost History

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I've been trying to research early Georgian stables in Britain over the last few months. It's been an unexpected challenge. Whatever topic or era I've tried to research up to now, I've always found books, museums or information online. Not so stables.
One small booklet spanning the medieval to the Victorian era has been my total haul up to now. It hadn't occured to be until now that this would be such an obscure topic, but when I started to think about it, it made sense.
Stables were gradually superseeded by cars as a means of transport. Cars required storage space and so no-longer-needed stables were converted or flattened. The way of life for those that lived and worked in and around the stables was eroded and finally lost. As stable work was the province of the working man, possibly illiterate, and not of any relevance to the wealthy and influential, little of that way of life was recorded or preserved.


Dyrham Park

I took a trip up to Dyrham Park, outside Bath, in July. This is our local National Trust property, and I hoped the guides might be able to tell me more about life in the stables. I was sadly diappointed. The ony information on offer (compared to a great wealth of detail on the life of the great house itself) was the date of the stables' conversion to garages.
The stables are still there, of course. Like stables in nearly all other great houses they have been converted to garages, and then tea rooms, gift shops, conference rooms or wedding venues. Nothing of their original use remains.

Stable Archway

So I could admire the archway that led through from the front facade of the house through to the main stable yard, wide and tall enough for both horses, carriages and carts. I could recreate the stalls and loose boxes in my mind while drinking tea and enjoying a scone where once horses would have munched hay and rested. But as to the life of the horses and their grooms, I left the property none the wiser.


Stables converted to gift shop

Many unanswered questions remain. For example, did the stable staff eat their meals with the house servants or seperately? I'm tempted to think the upper servants might have objected to the aroma of horse at meal times. Where did they sleep? What hours did they work? Long ones, no doubt, but it would be nice to know.
The most useful piece of information I picked up at Dyrham is that there is a NT Carriage Museum at Arlington Court in Devon, so that is the next trip I'm planning. I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile if anyone has found information on this topic that I've missed, please do share!

Stable block attached to main house