Fire & Roses On Location

edmenham Abbey

My inspiration for Fire & Roses actually came from three locations, all near each other. The first one was Medmenham Abbey, which I blogged about here .

 
Hellfire Caves

Then there’s the Hellfire Caves themselves. This was irresistible! I first visited them about eight years ago, when my kids were still quite young. It’s great because there are so many stories attached to it – including, of course, ones about ghosts! I wove these into the plot (Sir Ambrose Vyner is my own invention, though). Here is the entrance to the caves (above).

And here are some pictures from inside:

Hellfire Caves - inside

This is from the Inner Temple:

Hellfire Caves Inner temple

And this is one of the many carvings on the walls:

carving on wall West Wycombe Park

While there we also visited West Wycombe Park, where there is a lovely stately home, belonging to the Dashwood Family (right)

This would have made a great location too, but there was only so much I could fit in! I do, however, mention the Dashwood Mausoleum, a large hexagonal building looming at the top of the hill above the caves:

Dashwood Mausoleum
Sir Francis Dashwood

The family’s ancestor, Sir Francis Dashwood, is the one who started up the Hellfire Club in the 18th Century – and of course the club itself was very much an inspiration for my story! But interesting though Sir Francis was, it was another member, John Wilkes, who really caught my attention. There is a scene in Fire & Roses where some sort of ghostly presence rips a page out of a book, crumples it, and throws it at Kitty’s feet. The page has a picture on it (described on p83). This is the picture (right) with a close up of his face underneath

(Can you spot Wilkes in the Inner Temple picture?)

Finally, I needed a village in the area that Kitty might visit. I could have used West Wycombe itself:

West Wycombe

But it’s not on the river, and my village needed to be on the nearby stretch of the Thames, from where you can spot Medmenham Abbey). So I picked Hurley, which is a gorgeous place not far away – though I changed the name to Oxenden:

Hurley

There really are several islands in the river at Hurley – and one of them is rather like the one where Louis bases his club!