Chesil Beach and Abbotsbury – The Real Location Behind The Chesil Beach Murders
Chesil Beach is a real pebble beach on the Dorset coast, running along the Fleet towards Portland, and together with nearby Abbotsbury and St Catherine's Chapel it's the setting for The Chesil Beach Murders, book 11 in my Dorset Crime series. Here's how I researched the locations, and how a last-minute change took the opening scene up to St Catherine's Chapel.
Why Chesil Beach?
I've been visiting Chesil Beach and the area around it for years. I have a vague memory of driving through Weymouth, spotting a glimpse of Chesil Beach, and then climbing the road up towards Portland in the back of my parents' car. I must have been very young.
Since then I've had plenty of opportunities to go to that part of Dorset. I've set multiple books there, and I've enjoyed spending time exploring the area. Chesil Beach itself fascinates me. In particular, the fact that nobody knows exactly why the stones get bigger from one end to the other. Presumably, it's something to do with tides and current and wind and whatnot. But the reality is that the scientists who've studied it can't work out exactly what the process is that's making that happen, which makes Chesil Beach a bit of a mystery.
Can you walk along Chesil Beach?
I've never walked all the way along Chesil Beach. It's one of those walks where, if you start out, you really have to be committed to finishing it, and walking on pebbles isn't that much fun. Besides, at certain times of year, you're not allowed to walk along the beach – certainly not far in from the shoreline – because of the protected bird species nesting there.
But I have taken walks around the Fleet and the area behind Chesil Beach, including a wonderful walk to do some location research for The Chesil Beach Murders.
How the crime scene moved to St Catherine's Chapel
I made quite a big change to the opening scene of the book, ridiculously late in the process. Normally, I know exactly where my crime scene is going to be before I even start writing. I'll have it mapped out in my head, I'll be mulling over ideas, and I'll spend time going to the location and visiting it… all before a single word gets written.
But this time was a bit different.
I had it in my head that the body is found behind Chesil Beach on the western side of the Fleet by a birdwatcher, and I wrote that opening scene. But then Joel, my editor – who also writes the Cumbria Crime series with me – pointed out that in the most recent Cumbria Crime book we'd written together, we also had a birdwatcher finding a body.
Now I know there are only so many types of person you can use in the opening scene of a crime novel, and I do try to avoid dog walkers as much as possible, but I didn't want to have two birdwatchers back-to-back.
However, it still had to take place at Chesil Beach. After all, the title was finalised and the cover had been designed. So I did a bit of research first and looked for spots around Chesil Beach that might make iconic places for me to dump that body. And I came up with the idea of St Catherine's Chapel.
I've often glimpsed St Catherine's Chapel in the distance when I've been driving down the coast road towards Portland Bill and Weymouth. It sits on a hill between Abbotsbury and the Fleet and has amazing views down towards Chesil Beach and along towards Portland. At sunrise in particular, you can get some fantastic views of it.
And that gave me an idea.
Instead of a birdwatcher, why not have a photographer who has taken a trek up to St Catherine's Chapel to get that elusive sunrise photo… and finds a body?
Researching The Chesil Beach Murders at Abbotsbury
I'd seen St Catherine's Chapel from afar, and I'd looked at it in photos and on maps, but I knew that I needed to get close to it in order to be able to write the scene. So I took myself off to Abbotsbury and went on a stunning walk. There are highlights of it in this video.
Abbotsbury is a weird place. It's tiny and punches well above its weight in terms of points of interest and tourist attractions. Firstly, it's a pretty village, somewhere that you might visit anyway. If this was in the Cotswolds, it would be full of people just looking at the architecture and the general quaintness of it all.
It also has an abbey, which is ruined and in itself quite interesting.
But then, of course, it has the famous Abbotsbury Swannery. It has the Fleet. It has Chesil Beach. And not to be outdone, it has Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens. I've heard the festive lights there are lovely, and I may yet squeeze that into a book sometime.
I started off in Abbotsbury, where I had a little walk around the village to get my bearings, and then I headed up the hill towards St Catherine's Chapel. It's on the top of Chapel Hill – there's an imaginative name – and it's a lovely walk. There's a very wide path leading up to it with a gate big enough for a vehicle to get through, which, of course, gave me some story ideas.
After all, getting a body to the top of a steep hill could be tricky. But if this spot has vehicular access, then that broadens the scope for suspects, because they don't have to be strong enough to drag or carry a body up a hill. But anyway – spoilers – I will say no more.
Can you go inside St Catherine's Chapel?
Sadly, you can't go inside. I did try the door, but it was bolted and probably nailed shut. Obviously, that didn't stop me having a good old snoop around. I walked all the way around the building, looking for nooks and crannies and places where you might hide something that shouldn't be there, and also worked out what route the investigating team would take to reach the site and how the forensic setup might work.
And then, of course, there's the matter of CCTV or witnesses. In an urban area, there are always opportunities to add CCTV evidence to a plot, but on the top of a hill overlooking a stretch of coastline, there really isn't. I can't pretend that a disused chapel in the middle of nowhere has got a camera on the top of it.
But given that the person who finds the body is a photographer, this opens up possibilities, because this person is not alone. They're part of a photography club, and this club likes to fly drones over the chapel.
So once again, I did some research, because the flying of drones isn't something you can do wherever you want. I discovered that English Heritage owns the site, and that if you want to fly a drone there, you have to get specific permission from them, and possibly be accompanied too. That led to me making some tweaks to particular chapters in the story.
Abbotsbury Swannery and the Fleet
I then walked down towards Abbotsbury Swannery… which is amazing, and another place where I'd love to set a book. There are so many of them in Dorset.
On the way I spotted a concrete structure that I can only assume is a gun emplacement from the Second World War. I was tempted to change my whole chapel-related plot to have the body found here, but resisted.
Abbotsbury Swannery is really unusual. It's a natural stretch of water where swans have presumably chosen to gather over the centuries, and there is a man at the swannery whose job title is swanherd. He thinks he might be the only swanherd in the world, or at least the only official one, and he described his job in an episode of the BBC's Open Country radio programme. It's a fascinating listen if you want to know more about the location.
Then I skirted round the bottom of the hill by the swannery, took some lovely pictures of the Fleet, imagined how my detectives might find themselves tramping around some of the less accessible paths, and then came across a gate that somebody had bolted shut. This was a gate across a public footpath marked on my OS map, but somebody clearly didn't like walkers, so they'd added a chain and a padlock.
Undeterred, I carried on walking, tramping my way through a stream, over a muddy bank, almost falling over, and eventually I got back into Abbotsbury. God knows what I'd have done if I were less able-bodied.
So the moral of this story is twofold. Firstly, Abbotsbury has a ridiculous amount to do if you ever decide to visit. And secondly, the people of Abbotsbury might not actually want you walking along their footpaths.
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New to the series? Start with The Corfe Castle Murders, or get the prequel novella The Ballard Down Murder free.
