How Cornwall Shapes My Stories

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Cornwall has shaped my life and my writing for so many years that it is hard to imagine myself anywhere else. I arrived here quite by chance in 1995, but very quickly knew I had found the place where I belonged. It felt like coming home to somewhere I had not yet lived and it has fuelled my imagination ever since. There are stories everywhere.

I have always believed that the places we visit and those we settle in can rouse something deep within us. Cornwall does that for me every single day. Its rugged coastline, wild moors, the myths of Merlin and the tales of smugglers are an endless source of inspiration for writers and I count myself lucky to live among landscapes that have fed my imagination from Katy Carter Wants a Hero (2010) to The Gift (2024). My writing style has changed and matured in keeping with the changes in my life, and although I may no longer write rom coms or chick lit, the backdrop to my work remains this remote and beautiful part of the world.

Cornwall’s writers have always understood the power of this landscape. Du Maurier, Pilcher, Walmsley and many others captured its pull long before Poldark galloped into the national imagination. There are smugglers coves, wreckers tales, legends of giants, lonely engine houses and stories of love and loss along the coast.

My own first published novel was set in Cornwall and fate played a kind hand when Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan happened across my manuscript. Their support brought national attention to a story that had been written in between teaching, mucking out horses and being part of a village community. I think this sums up Cornwall. You can share a pub with fishermen, millionaires, rock stars, one lived in my village for a while, and daytime television presenters and nobody bats an eyelid. The focus is always on the local story. Cornwall is a great leveller. When the wind rages in and flings fistfuls of rain and brine at windows we all get drenched.

One of the most beloved places in my writing is Polperro. With its narrow lanes, fishing boats rising and falling with the tide, the haunted beach cave and the colourful cast of locals, the village where I lived in 2010 became the backdrop for my Katy Carter novel. I wrote it after E. V. Thompson advised me to write what I knew rather than try to be a Jilly Cooper wannabe. A London teacher moves to Cornwall in the hope of a fresh start as an author. I knew that story well and the rest is history.

Polperro also seeps into Polwenna Bay, my bestselling series which has recently been published in Germany and will hopefully reach screens before long. I wrote the first books in that series while I was living in the Cayman Islands in 2013. I was homesick and try as I might I could not write about a tropical paradise. My heart was not in it so I came home on the page instead. Readers tell me they feel as if they walk into Polwenna as strangers and leave as friends. They have taken characters such as Reverend Jules, Granny Alice and the wily Pollards to their hearts and I often receive emails telling me what the world of Polwenna Bay means to them. That is the highest praise for any storyteller.

The Gift, the first in my new Polwenna Past series, gave me the chance to step back into the world of Granny Alice, a much loved character from the Polwenna Bay books, and to bring the past alive. It became a historical novel too because it follows a dual timeline, one of my favourite ways of telling a story, and the narrative moves between the present day and the early 1950s. I loved talking to older Polperro and Talland residents about what they remembered of life here during the war and afterwards. There were happy memories for some and sad ones for others, a tessellation of what living through that time was like. Life in a 1950s Cornish fishing village was hard and social class and standing were hugely important. Women had fewer opportunities and through Alice I was able to explore the limitations and frustrations that young women with dreams and ambitions had to fight against in order to be heard.

Talland Bay is the setting for my first Rosecraddick novel, The Letter. It began with an old tobacco tin filled with faded photographs and love letters which had belonged to my great aunt who had lost her fiancé in the First World War. She never stopped hoping he might return and spent the rest of her life searching and waiting. Her story poured onto the pages and Talland’s wide sweep of bay, the clifftop war memorial and the turning tides seemed a natural place to set a fictionalised account of her experience. I really feel this setting also gives the book its sense of timelessness and hope.

The research for this book took me on a fascinating journey through Cornwall in the early 1900s, to the great houses of Lanhydrock and Cotehele and back to the horrors of the First World War through poetry and diaries. The heart of the story belongs to Ella, my great aunt, and to the whole Lost Generation who never came home.

The idea for The Promise came to me during a walk from Pont Creek to Polruan where I stumbled upon the remnants of the Second World War half swallowed by undergrowth. As I took time to notice the remains of pillboxes and the old Home Guard station, I thought about the concrete tank traps still visible on the beaches and the old Nissen huts used in farmyards across Cornwall. The past was still there just over my shoulder and there were stories everywhere. This walk was the genesis of a novel about war, loss, courage and the beauty of Cornwall even in the darkest times.

Trebah Gardens near Falmouth and the history of American troops stationed on the Helford to prepare for the D Day landings were woven into the fictional Pencallyn House and gardens where Estella and Evie live. The stories of African American GIs in Cornwall were some of the hardest but most vital parts to write because they shaped the character of Jay Miller and brought truth to the page.

During the lockdowns, the Fowey River became my sanctuary. I walked the banks every day, finding comfort in the rhythm of the tide and the quiet of the woods. One abandoned house tucked away in a bend of the river became the seed of Oyster Shore. Its boathouse sinking into the mud, the ribs of forgotten boats on the shore and the oyster shells scattered among them were the perfect setting for what became the third Rosecraddick novel. For ten months this place, also dear to Daphne du Maurier, became my refuge and as the inspiration for Ned’s great novel is the heart of the story. I still visit Oyster Shore by boat and often imagine my characters walking the tideline.

Childhood fantasies of secret islands and tidal causeways shaped The Island Legacy. This story let me step back into the magic and adventure of Cornwall. I loved visiting St Michael’s Mount to research the interior of a castle and the experience of walking across the causeway as the tide crept closer. Looe Island, said to have been visited by Jesus when he travelled with his merchant uncle Joseph of Arimathea, no coincidence that the island was once owned by Glastonbury Abbey, gave me the setting for St Pirran with its seals, wild beauty and shifting tides.

If you would like to retrace these paths and explore the landscape of my imagination, you can find these places in my books. From Polwenna Bay to Oyster Shore, from The Letter to The Island Legacy, the magical Cornwall I know is written into every page.