The following note about my love affair with Cornwall, featured in a Special Edition of The Lake House, published in the UK in 2016. Reading it now, some years later, in a room on the opposite side of the globe from that in which I wrote it, I am struck by how keenly I long to walk those coastal cliff paths again. For now, alas, I will have to rely on my memories and the magic of words to transport me.

I hope this piece delivers you, too, to the windswept Cornish coastline, and conveys at least some of the enchantment of the place.

On Cornwall

I’ve been involved in a long-distance love affair with Cornwall for as long as a I can remember: it’s such a beautiful, unique, and enchanting place to visit, whether in person or in my imagination. I’m a very visual person and most inspired when I have interesting things to look at. Country or city, inside or out, natural or otherwise, I’m not particular: I love landscapes and laneways; the sky and the sea; chimney tops, hidden doorways and beautiful gardens.

I also love music, art and theatre, and of course history, in particular that cool, shivery sense that the past still surrounds us. Most of all, I’m drawn to places that make me feel something, and Cornwall—with its windy coastlines and spectacular wildflowers, its abundant gardens and pretty whitewashed cottages, its enveloping atmosphere of history, mystery, myth and magic—is just such a place.

When I was dreaming up The Lake House, I wanted a setting that leant itself to a story in which an abandoned house might be rapidly consumed by nature. Loeanneth in the 1930s, when we meet the Edevane family, is a place of pristine cultivation, of well-kept gardens, and efficient household staff, the country home of a genteel family leading a genteel life. It is a locus amoenus, of course, a ‘delightful place’; and, as is usual with this literary trope, it provides an idealised location of enclosure and containment that engenders a sense of belonging in the characters.

But, by situating the house and its gardens in the midst of such a wild and rugged landscape, surrounded by thick woods and within hearing distance of crashing ocean waves, it was all too easy to imagine how quickly nature would come to reclaim the estate after tragedy struck and the family moved away. Seventy years later, when Sadie Sparrow, a detective on leave, stumbles upon the once-elegant house and garden, she discovers a vastly different scene from that in 1933: a real-life sleeping beauty house, waiting for the truth to awaken it.

When I was finishing The Lake House, I was able to spend the summer in Cornwall. It was a truly surreal experience, like stepping into the pages of my own book and having the world of the story come to life around me. I walked the very cliff-top paths that Sadie runs along, looked out across the same rugged coastline and vast ocean, and visited country houses just like Loeanneth would have been before the Edevane family locked it up and left.

One of my favourite houses was Trerice, near Newquay, an Elizabethan Manor set amidst an estate of gorgeous gardens. I visited a number of times, and on one occasion, the weather was particularly stunning. It was one of those perfect August days when the air holds just the right amount of warmth and it seems as if time might stand still. The sky was a clear, bright blue, and the leaves and flowers of the garden were glistening. It reminded me very much of how Loeanneth would have looking on Midsummer’s Eve morning in June 1933, as final preparations were put in place for the party that night.

I loved driving along the narrow, winding Cornish roads, hedgerows growing tall on either side, rounding the corner to discover yet another village waiting to be explored. One of my favourites was Portloe: I could just imagine Bertie’s place, high on the hill amongst the other whitewashed cottages, overlooking the harbour and wide, blue ocean.

Some of the most breathtaking cliff walks I found were on the north coast. We spent a particularly glorious summer’s day near Boscastle, where the wildflowers were thick with bumble bees, gulls soared above the sea, and contented cows and horses ignored us as they grazed in the nearby fields. Walking such beautiful trails, as the waves crashed against the bottom of the cliffs, and the sky loomed above us, was truly exhilarating.

Tracing my characters’ paths over the summer, I came to know Cornwall in a new and deeper way. Our love affair is no longer one of distance. I have seen and felt and smelled and heard it for myself, and gained new ideas for other stories. Cornwall is a special place, one in which I feel anchored and inspired, and one I know I’ll return to, both in person, and in my novels, many more times.

Kate Morton, London, 2015