A Passion for History

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The history behind The Blanchland Secret

The Blanchland Secret is set in part in my beloved Somerset and also in Bath. Bath had passed its heyday as a fashionable spa by the Regency period, and although it was still an elegantly genteel town, the more fashionable crowds considered it a little shabby.  For this part of the story I used various books for research, including The Dream of Bath by Diana Winsor, which gives an insight into the transformation of Bath during the Georgian period and its subsequent slow decline.

The rest of the story is set in the Somerset countryside, where I lived for seven years. The village I live in had a lost manor house, demolished in the early twentieth century, and every day as I walked up the village street and looked at the sweep of the hills, I would try to imagine what it would have looked like when Norton Hall stood in its parkland beside the tumbling stream. Woodallan is based on Norton Hall. According to Old Mendip, by Robin Atthill, the house was built in about 1700 and was an imposingly symmetrical building with mullioned windows and seven bays. Panelling from Norton Hall can still be found in a nearby farmhouse and there was a rumour that several cottages in the village incorporated bits of the lost manor house. Certainly our cottage, which came with its own ghost, also had a huge inglenook fireplace that was rumoured to come from one of the village's vanished manor houses...

When Sarah and Amelia are travelling to Woodallan, they take shelter at the Old Down Inn on the Bath road. This is an ancient hostelry still standing today, which features in Georgette Heyer's Friday's Child as well as in other books. The inn dates back to 1640 and was a posting house for many years. The weather in the Mendips could be inclement. In 1774, Parson Woodforde, whose memoirs I also drew on for the story, wrote:

"I got to Old Down between 3 and 4 this afternoon where I stayed about a quarter of an hour, ate some cold roast beef, drank a pint of ale and then got into a fresh chaise... It snowed all the way very thick from Bath to Old Down..."