The south of this country definitely has a different climate to the rest of us – so much warmer, milder and dryer. However, I’ve recently learnt from my Auntie Elsie that the South West is similar to Wales – all that rain coming across from the Atlantic dumps down on the western counties, shielding the rest of us from the worst of the weather. In the midlands we are doubly blessed because it all dumps on Ireland and Wales so we get it easier than most.
I remember Land’s End (with the vertigo-inducing sheer drops over the cliff) in Cornwall from my teens, also St Michael’s Mount – twinned with Brittany’s Mont St Michel, and apparently on the same ley line.
I have vague memories of Weymouth and the Chesil beaches in Devon, and in the 90s, we always stopped in Exmouth on the way down to the ferries, and every so often Bri will trot out the story of “the best bit of cod in the country.” We returned to Exmouth in 2000 and Weymouth in 2001, staying in static caravans with friends. Bri’s brother lives in Bournemouth, so we stayed down there a few times.
Ilfracombe in North Devon was always special to my mum after she was evacuated there during the war, and we visited this beautiful seaside town to scatter her ashes in the mid-naughties.
Visits to Elsie included trips out to Tintagel, visiting the castle (believed to be the site of Camelot) and Merlin’s cave.
More recently, Dad and I spent several days tracking various sites along the Michael and Mary ley lines as described in Hamish Miller’s Sun and Serpent. Places like Burrow Mump, Brentor and the eerily intense Lydford, where I first used dowsing rods. In the course of writing the Hengist series, in the early 2010s, I researched the heck out of all the spiritual sites around what was Wessex (mostly Wiltshire and Somerset), including Gastonbury, Avebury and Stonehenge.
