This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
We’ve fallen in love with the utterly charming characters of Alexandra Brown’s The Great Village Show, the second of her books to be set in the quirky country village of Tindledale. As a special treat, Alex is here to share the real-life inspiration for Tindledale with a peek at her new interactive map.
My last two novels, The Great Christmas Knit Off and The Great Village Show are set in the fictional village of Tindledale.
Readers often ask me whether Tindledale is based on a real place. Of course, the characters are purely from my imagination as I live in a very real rural village on the Kent and East Sussex border in the South of England, and I’d hate to upset my neighbours by inadvertently letting them think I’d portrayed their quirky country ways in anything but an utterly charming light.
And to be honest, my characters are sometimes less than perfect – but, well, OK, I couldn’t resist basing one character, Molly (who likes to take her pet ferret for a walk on a lead around the village) on an actual person. I spotted a woman doing this for real. The ferret had a little orange high visibility vest on … you really couldn’t make this stuff up!
So living where I do is the perfect inspiration for Tindledale, with its abundance of undulating green fields full of sheep, cows, buttercups, strawberries and apple orchards.
The High Street in the neighbouring village is dotted with black and white Tudor framed shops with tiny mullioned windows just as they are in Tindledale’s High Street. I live in an Oast house with a roundel at one end, which provided the perfect inspiration for Hettie’s home in The Great Christmas Knit Off.
And every morning when I walk Puppy Oscar, my black Labrador – who isn’t actually a puppy anymore, but the name seems to have stuck – I’m lucky enough to walk through an orchard with a cosy, old ramshackle cottage beside it. This has been the perfect inspiration for my next Tindledale book, The Mystery of Orchard Cottage, coming in May 2016.
Over the years I’ve taken hundreds of photos of my village and the surrounding areas which I have covering a wall in my office where I write, helping to make Tindledale a very real place – that I hope to have created for my readers.
You can take a tour of Tindledale right here, just click on the link and be transported back to a traditional village of bygone days where nothing bad ever happens … or so it seems.