Talking Location with author Helen Grant – Perthshire and Fife

19th May 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… author Helen Grant – Perthshire and Fife

“Langlands House is haunted, but not by the ghost you think.” That’s the opening line of Ghost, and it has a special relevance for me. Perthshire, where I’ve lived since 2011, is full of thrillingly creepy places: ruined castles, abandoned villages, disused churches. If you see a lone figure haunting one of them, it’s quite possibly me.

An abandoned country mansion

I love exploring. My previous novels were themed around urbex (urban exploration) and I got the bug for it while doing the book research. When we moved to Perthshire, I found myself exploring totally different types of places. I’ve become really interested in the lost country houses of Scotland. Many of them were built on a grand scale in the early 1800s and then abandoned in the mid twentieth century when they became impractical to maintain. Some were demolished and others were actually blown up! But some of them were just unroofed and left to crumble away in the countryside. Visiting these lonely and often magnificent ruins, all overgrown with weeds, is exciting and fascinating. It made me wonder how it would be if instead of gutting a house, the occupants had simply locked it up and walked away, leaving the contents intact. Who might have taken up residence in such a place, and why would they be hiding themselves away from the world like that? And that is where I got the idea for Ghost.

Innerpeffray Library

Nearly everything in the book is based on real places. Although Langlands House is fictional, its magnificent library crammed with old leather-bound books was inspired by the Library of Innerpeffray, near Crieff. Founded in 1680, it is Scotland’s oldest lending library. Since the 1700s it has been housed in a beautiful Georgian building overlooking the churchyard on one side and the river on another. Entering the upstairs reading room (accessed via a spiral stone staircase) is like stepping back in time. I’ve visited the library many times and browsed through the books – the very oldest date back to the 1400s but visitors are allowed to handle most of them (carefully!). I’ve noticed a few books in Ancient Greek and Latin, both of which I studied at university years ago. I sometimes wonder how many other people nowadays can read those. That sparked the idea for Augusta, the heroine of Ghost; she knows both Greek and Latin but she knows virtually nothing about the world outside the Langlands estate.

The top of Torlum Hill, with trig point

The town referred to throughout the novel (but not named) is Crieff, which is probably best known for the splendid Crieff Hydro, a large Victorian hotel set in extensive grounds. I think one of the loveliest things to do in Crieff is take one of the many country walks around the town, and some of these are featured in Ghost. It is the arrival of Tom McAllister from the “outside” that leads Augusta to begin tentatively to explore the world beyond Langlands, and often the two of them go to quite quiet places, where they can talk in peace and Augusta won’t attract too much attention from anyone. So they walk up to the top of Torlum Hill, which has wonderful views over the surrounding countryside, and they also go along Lady Mary’s Walk, a path that runs alongside the river Earn. I’ve been up Torlum Hill four or five times myself, but I’ve completely lost count of the number of times I’ve been along Lady Mary’s Walk. I like to walk there all year round, and in the summer I love to swim in the river. It’s cold but bracing! If you walk the entire length of Lady Mary’s Walk, there are the remains of an old railway bridge, and beyond it there is a ruined cottage. That’s very typical of rural Scotland, that there are these relics of the past still visible in the environment like that. Nobody has knocked the cottage down, nor have they renovated it or fenced it off. It’s just sitting there, and I find it so mysterious! If those walls could speak, I wonder what stories they would tell?

Lady Mary’s Walk and the River Earn

Ghost is not a traditional ghost story, although Langlands House has a reputation for being haunted; it’s about the way that the past haunts the present, and the ghost of past events affects what happens now. I feel that very strongly when I visit abandoned buildings. You can see the passage of time in the visible decay of the structure.

The author on the Elie Chain Walk

The setting of Ghost does extend beyond the borders of Perthshire. There’s a scene where Tom offers to take Augusta anywhere she likes, and she asks him to take her to see the sea, because she’s never seen it. So Tom drives her to Elie, on the Fife coast. It takes about an hour and half to get there from Crieff. It’s on the Fife coastal path, so I think a lot of people go through it because of that. We normally go there to tackle the Elie Chain Walk, which is an amazing and sometimes daunting experience. There is a section of cliffs and rocks about half a kilometre long, which you navigate by means of little steps cut into the rock, and lengths of heavy steel chains to hang onto. It’s exciting, especially when there is a high tide and the water is washing back and forth just under your feet (or over them…). In the book, Tom and Augusta don’t attempt the Chain Walk, but they do visit the beach and the clifftops above. And Augusta learns that day that Tom’s eyes aren’t really the colour of the sea, as she has imagined, because they are blue-green, and the real sea is a shimmering grey. Ghost is not just the story of a haunting, it’s also a love story.

Shot of the book, Ghost, in location

Thank you so much to Helen for a wonderful “trip” to this beautiful part of Scotland.

You can follow Helen on Twitter at @helengrantsays and of course you can buy her book through the TripFiction database!

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