#HistFicThursdays - The Story of Wintercombe - Pamela Belle - Guest Post: Building Locations

Today, for my #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be sharing a guest post from Pamela Belle as she introduces the world of Wintercombe, the setting for her series of books.

The Story of Wintercombe

I’ve always loved old houses, especially those built in the mediaeval and Tudor periods – somehow, Georgian grandeur just doesn’t do it for me. Elizabeth Bennet may have fallen in love with Pemberley, but I’d just think about all that chilly marble flooring and those high ceilings, and how difficult it would be to heat, never mind the dusting.

Rushbrooke Hall in Suffolk, taken in

 the 1940s

For my first historical novels, I was inspired by Rushbrooke, the house, alas no longer standing, where my mother had lived as a small child, another, similar house called Kentwell Hall, and also the perfect pocket mediaeval manor, Stokesay, in Shropshire. I had four books under my belt, and was looking for a subject for another. Then I went to stay with a friend who had just moved to Wiltshire. She took me for a drive, one chilly February morning, and said, ‘You simply must see this fabulous house.’ We drove down narrow country lanes, and pulled up outside Great Chalfield Manor, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. 

The entrance front of Great Chalfield

 Manor in Wiltshire

Ancient, gabled, built of the local golden-grey stone, it spoke to me of a hundred secret stories – at least one of which, I wanted to tell.

Great Chalfield, looking over the

 moat and gardens.

In the summer, when it was open to the public (it’s owned by the National Trust), I went back, and wandered round the house and gardens, entranced by the terraces, the moat, the splendid Great Hall, and the listening masks in the walls high above, so that the lord, or the lady, could keep an eye and an ear on what was happening down below. It was the inspiration I had been looking for. Back at home, I read up on the history of the house, and found that it had hosted a garrison during the English Civil War – my favourite historical period, ever since I’d fallen in love with Prince Rupert at an impressionable age. Better and better – except that the owner of the house at the time had been an elderly widow. I wanted to write about a young woman with a family, so I used a novelist’s licence and picked up Great Chalfield and put it down in one of my favourite villages, Norton St. Philip in Somerset. I’d first visited it when I was a member of the King’s Army, doing a weekend re-enactment with my regiment in Wiltshire a few years before. On the Saturday, we’d all gone, in costume, to the George, and spent the evening singing Cavalier drinking songs in the main bar. There was a group of American tourists sitting in the corner, and I suspect they thought we put on the same show every night!

So I had my location – or so I thought, until I paid the village another visit in a wet November, and found that the field where I’d thought to put the house was two foot under flood water. Time for another look at the map, now with the actual landscape in front of me. The side of a low hill just outside Philip’s Norton (as it was known in the 17th century) was ideal. The village itself is beautiful, full of old houses which would have been standing during the Civil War, and the next stage in my research beckoned – to find out more about what it was like at that time. So off I went to the Somerset Record Office in Taunton – and there serendipity struck, because amongst their documents on Norton St Philip, there was a survey of the village made in the 1630s for Lord Craven, then the absentee Lord of the Manor.

The George at Norton St Philip

Every plot, every field, every house, every outbuilding, was listed, along with the name of the tenant, and they were all numbered: the map that had evidently once accompanied it was no longer extant, but using the survey, it was possible, and utterly fascinating, to reconstruct it, cross-referencing with the parish registers (which, in complete contrast to the beautifully written survey, looked as if a demented spider had control of the pen). By the time I’d finished, I had the names, addresses, families, social standing and, in many cases, occupations, of pretty much every tenant in Philip’s Norton during the Civil War period.

Naming the house took some thought. I wanted something that would sound poetic without being too unlikely. Even that took a lot of research in place-name volumes, and eventually, after several other considerations (I rejected Honeycombe as being far too twee), I settled on Wintercombe. Its most likely meaning was ‘valley of the vines’, which for a sunlit slope seemed appropriate and right. Above all, I wanted the world I was creating to be as accurate, plausible and convincing as possible.

Of course, the danger of all that in-depth research (which was indisputably the most interesting part of planning the book) was the temptation to show off with massive info-dumps at every available opportunity. I’ve always been a history geek, but I think research should be like an iceberg – the reader should only be able to see a small part of it, but what’s invisible stops the whole edifice capsizing. A lot of those details didn’t make it into the book, but almost all the servants of Wintercombe actually existed, and sometimes I was able to use clues in the documents to give me pointers to their characters. For instance Bessie Lyteman, the flirtatious dairymaid, was the mother of not one, but two, children born out of wedlock. And the villain of the piece, Lieutenant-Colonel Ridgeley, the Royalist officer in charge of the garrison, was also a real person, and to judge from contemporary accounts, just as unpleasant as I depicted him.

I was so captivated by the St Barbe family and their beautiful house that I couldn’t stop at just one book, so I wrote three sequels, taking their story through the later years of the 17th century (when Philip’s Norton was the scene of a skirmish in Monmouth’s rebellion, an opportunity that was far too good to ignore).

And how much of me is in the central character of Silence, the quiet, unassuming Puritan wife who finds so much courage and resourcefulness in adversity? Well, like her, I’m a gardener, with a gardener’s patience, and I love children, music and animals. Whether I’d have been as brave in those circumstances is a very moot point – as one of my friends was fond of saying, ‘cowards run in my family.’ But I can certainly identify with her more than with her vain, wilful granddaughter Louise, or even with her acerbic and intellectual niece Phoebe, and she remains one of my favourite creations.

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