Location Spotlight: Greystone Vale
As I enter the final stages of editing Lantern in the Fog and begin preparing my debut novel for print, it would probably make sense to put the spotlight on Dawnhold or Larkspur Crossing. They are, after all, the first places readers will explore.
Instead, I’ve found myself thinking about Greystone Vale.
This summer my husband and I returned to Cumbria, with my family. It’s somewhere we’ve loved visiting together for the past eleven years. Every visit reminds me why this landscape found its way so naturally into The Dawnshield Order. The sweeping fells, dry stone walls, hardy sheep and ever-changing skies have become woven so deeply into the world of the novels that I can no longer separate one from the other.
Some places inspired very specific locations. Lanercost Priory became the inspiration for an important setting in my second novel, while Bookends in Carlisle sparked the idea for the Lantern Archive in Larkspur Crossing.
But Cumbria itself became Greystone Vale.
Greystone Vale is the childhood home of Evander and Elowen Drake, and generations of the Drake family have lived there before them. It is a quiet rural community known for its stonemasons, sheep farmers and dependable working horses.
Gareth Drake, Evander and Elowen’s father, was one of those stonemasons. As a young man he travelled to Dawnhold to work on the great stonework surrounding the capital, where he met Mariel, the daughter of a cloth merchant. They married for love before returning home, where Gareth built Drake Cottage on the edge of Greystone Vale for his growing family.
It was there that Evander and Elowen spent their childhood: helping in a garden filled with herbs and vegetables, listening to hens scratching in the yard, climbing trees, and exploring the surrounding hills. Although readers won’t visit Greystone Vale in Lantern in the Fog, it quietly shaped one of its most important characters long before the story begins. So much of Evander’s outlook on life; his humility, practical kindness, love of horses and quiet resilience, was formed here.
One of the unexpected highlights of this holiday was meeting a little pony called Razzle. Watching him graze so contentedly reminded me why horses became such an important part of Evander’s story. Long before he became a captain of the Dawnshield Order, he was simply a village boy who found comfort in the stables whenever life became difficult. That childhood love would eventually lead to one of my favourite relationships in the series: the bond between Evander and his beloved mare, Celandine.
Readers will finally visit Greystone Vale in Book Two: The Beacon and the Raven, where Evander returns home for the first time in five years.
An early glimpse of Greystone Vale:
Evander halted Celandine at the crest of the hill. Five years since he had walked these roads with clean boots and no blood under his nails, five years since he had left with a pack on his back and the sun of the Dawnshield Order bright in his chest like a second heart. Five years of letters, silver sent home month by month, battles, prayers, winter camps, and long roads that had taught his body hardness and his face new lines. And now he had come back to Greystone Vale half-fevered and unshaven.
The vale was much as it had always been. Chickens pecked in the mud near a fencepost. A dog barked once and then thought better of it. The mill stream ran quick from recent rain, muttering over stone. Somewhere farther off, he heard the clean ringing strike of hammer on iron. Every sound landed inside him like memory.
He knew every bend in the lane. The old ash tree where he and Elowen used to climb until Mariel shouted herself hoarse from the garden gate. The low stone trough where his father had once washed mortar from his forearms at dusk. The field edge where the summer grasses used to come high enough to hide in.
Then, at last, he saw it.
Drake Cottage sat where it always had, on its little rise above the stream, stone walls turned honey-grey. The roof was weathered now, and ivy had claimed more of the side wall than Gareth Drake would ever have allowed, but the bones of the place remained solid: patient stone, low windows, the same stubborn shape against the hill.
The garden was fuller than he remembered. Mariel had kept it alive. Herbs spilled over the low edging stones, and late flowers crowded the path in soft gold and violet. The picket gate leaned a little to one side. There were two hens scratching near the cabbages.
Light glowed warm behind the diamond-paned windows. Evander stopped and dismounted just outside the gate, tying Celandine loosely. The sight of that small square of gold nearly undid him.
He had seen campfires in snowfields, barracks lanterns, temple candles guttering before dawn, but nothing in all those years had ever struck him like that cottage window. It was too small a thing to carry such force. Too ordinary. Too dear.
Every time I come back to Cumbria, I find another piece of Greystone Vale waiting for me. Sometimes it’s the light breaking through rain clouds over the fells. Sometimes it’s a dry stone wall winding across a hillside. Sometimes it’s a cottage garden overflowing with herbs and flowers, or a small pony grazing quietly in a field.
Those moments remind me that fantasy doesn’t have to be invented from nothing. Often, it begins with paying attention to the real places that stay with us long after we’ve gone home.
