The Haunting Origins of Oyster Shore

Cornwall is an ancient land steeped in enigma. Myths, legends and ghost stories lace this place as tangibly as the sea fret and salt spray. On a dark winter’s night, when the wind screams from the bay and the waves rise in fury, tales of wreckers, doomed mariners and smugglers feel suddenly real, and I draw the curtains closed with a shiver. People here don’t mock the old stories for they know that unquiet walkers drift through ruins or keep silent watch from storm-pummelled cliffs. I’ve learned to respect these tales too. Yet I’m also haunted by quieter ghosts, wraiths of forgotten stories and the shades of lost lives that linger if you stand still long enough and know where to look.

Whenever I follow the narrow path that hems the River Fowey or climb through the folds of woodland that cradle its deep green water, I feel accompanied by the others have wandered here before me. Writers who carried notebooks in their pockets and felt the same fierce compulsion to capture the aching beauty of this landscape with words. They leaned into the wind, listening for voices of the past. Quiller-Couch. Kenneth Grahame. Du Maurier. There are others too whose names have slipped into the estuary mist.

During the long months of the Covid lockdowns, my daily river walks were a balm. In a world suddenly unfamiliar, I craved the rhythm of the tides and the steadfastness of ancient trees that had watched centuries turn. The river became a silver thread stitching past and present together. As I followed its curves, I wondered who else had sought refuge on these banks. This water had witnessed wars, plagues, religious upheaval, industry flourishing and decaying. It put the present into context and whispered that this too will pass. I would pause where the view opens onto the wide estuary and the first glimmer of sea appears beyond Fowey and find room to breathe and to think. I imagined Daphne du Maurier striding along the same path, hands in the pockets of her red slacks and her brow furrowed in thought, or perhaps glimpse here sailing her boat up Pont Pill. Her presence here is palpable.

One afternoon, compelled by a Hansel-and-Gretel instinct, I left the path and followed a rutted, overgrown track. Lockdown had emboldened everything, even nature, and it emboldened me. Daphne once crept into Menabilly and fell hopelessly in love; perhaps the same impulse tugged at me? Was she was there in spirit, urging me on? I ducked through brambles, pushed past monstrous gunnera turning feral, and found myself standing in a clearing and staring up at a forgotten house hidden deep in a wooded loop of the river.

I knew at once the place was special and had glimpsed it from the water, a pale flash behind dense greenery, shuttered and brooding, as if resentful of its abandonment. From the lane above it was invisible. Up close, the drive lay cracked with roots and furred with moss. Ivy swallowed the windows. The boathouse sank deeper into the mudflats with each tide. When the water retreats, the ribs of old boats rise from the silt like bones, and oyster shells scatter the shore. Remnants of a long-forgotten venture turned rogue, they lie in wait for unwary toes and unlucky boats.

Oyster Shore.

The name took hold at once, rooting itself like the saplings pushing through the drive. That hidden house threaded itself around everything I was writing and became another tributary joining the river of my Rosecraddick world. I felt the beat of a story immediately and I returned to the riverbank, opened my notebook, and found the voice of Ned, a young man longing to become an author, yearning to return to the golden land of his childhood and to the girl with bracken-coloured hair who had once been his closest friend and later on his lover.

Oyster Shore began to write itself as the lockdown continued and Ned, Madalyn and Gerald Snowe became constant companions through a strange and uncertain time. As the world tilted in 2020, so their world tilted in 1914. Trenches, mustard gas and sucking mud have a way of putting lockdowns and Netflix in perspective. This too shall pass.

What I didn’t realise then was how deeply the place itself had already been shaped by lost stories. The riverbank, the abandoned house, the collapsing boathouse had been known to du Maurier and other writers who had lived and dreamed here before. Their stories had faded, their names were dimmed by time, but their yearning for the creative lingered like silt on the riverbed. They watched over my shoulder as I wrote, a reminder that art is fragile, and that the line between being remembered and being lost is painfully thin.

Cornwall still draws those who come to the edge of the land seeking something they can’t quite name. Artists. Writers. Dreamers. Some become celebrated. Some slip quietly into the dark. All leave an imprint, felt more than seen. When I walk the paths along these secret reaches of the Fowey, I feel them beside me but not as ghosts, but rather as layers of longing and hope pressed into the landscape. Stories live here. Some endure. Some vanish. All ripple.

When I wrote Oyster Shore, I felt that presence. Through difficult days, it was a comfort and a reminder that eve the lost stories matter. They shape the ones that follow. They ask us to listen.

If the idea of forgotten voices, abandoned houses, hidden coves and quiet ghosts speaks to you, you may find yourself drawn to Oyster Shore too, a novel that followed the river, listened to its whispers, and found a story that might easily have been lost.