A Place in Time

Long-ago lives in a familiar landscape can provide fiction writers with a portal into the past. In an article that first appeared in Writing Magazine, Carolyn Kirby cosiders how best to evoke a sense of place.

Archie Parkhouse with ivy for sheep 1975 JAMES RAVILIOUS @Beaford Photographic Archive

An old man lives at the bottom of my garden. His name is Robert Barkus, or Bakehouse, or Bagust. Nobody is quite sure. But I often sense him around when I’m gardening, and I’ve found out a fair bit about him. I know that he was born in a cottage, no longer there, that was just near my compost bins, and that all his 79 years were lived in the vicinity of my garden where he worked, day after day, on this small spot of English soil that is so familiar to us both. He died nearby at his cousin’s house in 1851.

Even though this real Robert has been dead for 184 years I think about him a lot because a character called Robert Barkus has become a key part of my novel in progress, a tale of archaeology and rural unrest in a downland village around the year 1830. And more than any description of the rural landscape, with its unforgiving weather and cycles of hard agricultural labour, it’s this man who will bring the setting of my story to life.

Because in my view, the geographical setting of historical fiction is best conveyed not by descriptions of scenery but by characters who are rooted in their world. When you think about great historical novels with a strong sense of place like Winston Graham’s Poldark novels or Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez or Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, it’s the characters you remember more than the descriptions of the setting. The people’s voices bring their locations alive and their dramas are rooted in the challenges of living in a particular place at a particular time.

So it’s not enough to simply describe the landscape. As Hilary Mantel wisely says in her essay 10 Rules for Writing Fiction, “Description must work for its place. It can’t be simply ornamental. It ­usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.”

Following this rule, Kit Ravenglass, the protagonist of my most recently published novel Ravenglass, who has grown up within sight of the Lake District, is horrified to see its highest fells close up. To Kit, the great mountain, Skiddaw, is a “gloomy colossus,” ugly and dangerous and perhaps even a metaphor for the dreadful secret about his mother which despite being hugely ever-present, has been hidden throughout his childhood. Kit is born too early in the 18^th century to be influenced by a Romantic world view which later began to regard mountains as a source of beauty to be celebrated and protected. To Kit, the fells of the Lake District are dismal, uncivilized and best avoided.

Overlooking Skiddaw

Let’s return to the bottom of my garden and see what Robert Barkus has to say about the land he lives on. He's a plain countryman and his observations, even though they are in the third person, must stick to sort of language he would use. If he remarks on a sunset it’s not because the sky is washed with vibrant colours but because it heralds another dry day for his thirsty sheep. If he notices a fieldfare on a newly seeded strip, he will be thinking not of the bird’s spotted plumage or chattering song but of how best to kill it.

If I stand on the site of Robert’s vegetable garden in 2025 will help me with the basics of his world. Much hasn’t changed. The sweep of wooded hills and grassy valleys to the east, the clearly visible setting of the autumnal sun behind the western Downs. Even though the patterns of fields, woodland and roadways have changed completely, the soil is still as stony with chalk and flint as it was two hundred years ago. So I know, though not nearly as well as Robert did, how hard it is to dig and grow good produce here.

But to bring Robert to life by conveying the sights, sounds and smells that he experienced requires research and imagination. Parish records, tithe maps, censuses and an Enclosure Award give details about the population of the area and the type of farming that was carried out. So I know that Robert’s ears would have been filled, dawn to dusk, with the bleat of wandering sheep and the cries of small children from homes overcrowded with large families. Wildlife was different too, no red kites then, but countless swooping lapwings. The weather was colder and harsher; snow-drift winters, corn-flattening deluges in summer, fatal lightning. There’s no need for me to labour over descriptions of all this because as soon as the fictional Robert Barkus opens his mouth, his land comes alive.

The rich dialect of England’s southern uplands is wonderful to research in Victorian glossaries and in oral history recordings of long dead farmworkers. But novelists must be careful with dialect. Phonetic dialogue is hard to write convincingly and it can be off-putting for readers. A great deal can be conveyed with idiosyncratic word order and regional grammar, but the odd, odd word of dialect is enough.

More important than the way he speaks is what Robert Barkus talks about; the sick sheep in the field he calls the Quickset, a much-needed raincloud on the horizon, an argument with his neighbour about a damaged hedgerow. These are the elements of Robert’s landscape that create conflict and drama and make his life into a story worth telling.

Wiltshire stooks

Ann Cleeves, a writer whose works is imbued with a sense of location has explained how setting is much more in a novel than; “a pretty or atmospheric place.” In her essay, The Human Geography of Crime Fiction, she explains how a particular place can give rise to character, plot and theme. Setting, she says, “can explain the motive of the killer and the back story of the detective, the relationships between the suspects and witnesses.”

I found this happening while writing my debut novel, The Conviction of Cora Burns set in Victorian Birmingham. The geographical heart of the story lies in three great buildings; prison, workhouse and lunatic asylum, all built in the mid-19^th century alongside a canal on the outskirts of the growing city. Even before imagining Cora as a character, I found myself looking at an old map and thinking about the poor people who must have spent their whole lives rotating between the buildings of this canal-side campus of misery. How far would their lives have been shaped by these institutions and how far by their own personalities? It was a short hop from imagining this institutional landscape to creating the character of Cora Burns.  

Old maps and pictures of scenery can inspire a whole novel. Ravenglass is set in the 18^th century port of Whitehaven in Cumberland with a story rooted in the lives of seafarers and workers in the trades which kick started the industrial revolution. Early on in my research, I was blessed to find an annotated engraving of the town in the year 1738. The locations it named gave me a rich source of ideas, not just for scenes but also for characters; a beautiful Quaker girl glimpsed outside the Friends’ Meeting House on Scotch Street, a dreadful assault inside the quayside entrance to the coal pit known as the Bear Mouth, the life-changing revelation that Kit hears beside the salt-collecting pools on the sea-shore.

Whitehaven 1738 by Richard Parr (from British Library collection)

Historical accuracy isn’t vital to inspiration, however. Modern images can sometimes open a window onto a deeper past. The marvellous photographs James Ravilious took in Devon in the 1970s gave a me real sense of a much older way of rural life. And geography doesn’t need to be accurate in a novel. As Ann Cleeves says, “Not every place ends up as real in the book - I feel free to invent, or to merge. But the human geography is always real and at the heart of the story.”

Real places can be disguised and new ones invented as long as the spirit of the place and the atmosphere of the time remains authentic. So the village that my character Robert Barkus lives in will be fictional, but the end of my garden is still the best portal

into the novel. Because it’s this patch of ground, more than anything else, that connects my imagination to place my characters inhabit and helps me to recreate their lost world.