Lochranza Castle, Arran – The Real Location Behind Secrets and History
Lochranza Castle is a real ruined castle at the northern tip of the Isle of Arran, in Scotland, and it's the setting for Secrets and History, book 4 in my McBride & Tanner series. Here's why I chose it, and the image the whole book hangs on.
Where is Lochranza Castle?
Lochranza sits at the northern tip of Arran, and the castle sits on a spit of land poking out into the loch, so that at high water it looks almost as though it's floating.
I went to Arran to see it for myself, and took the lovely Sally, her dad and my son along with me.
And that's where the book began. Not with a plot, or a victim, or a question. Just the silhouette of the castle against the skyline, and the certainty that I was going to set a book there.
Can you go inside Lochranza Castle?
Yes. It was built in the 1200s and it's been a ruin since the late 1700s. Historic Environment Scotland look after it now, and you can walk in and stand on the ground floor with the sky where the roof used to be.
That's the bit that matters for the book. It's a ruin you can walk into. There's no door to force, no lock to pick, nothing to stop anyone going in at night. And the loch is right there.
A boat inside a castle
Once I had the castle, I had the picture that the whole book hangs on: a boat inside it, with a body inside the boat.
If you've seen the cover, you've seen it. Sharn, my cover designer, found an image that captured exactly what was in my head, and every time I look at it I'm back on that spit of land.
The questions it raised were the ones I wanted to spend a book answering. How do you get a boat inside a castle? Why would you? Anyone can kill someone and leave them where they fall. It takes a very particular sort of mind to do all that afterwards, and to want it found looking like that.
Which is exactly the sort of thing that brings in Petra McBride. A body in a ditch is a job for a detective. A body arranged like a message is a job for a forensic psychologist, and Secrets and History is built around the difference.
An island, and the people on it
Arran is a real island with real communities on it, so I invented the eco encampment a mile from the castle rather than borrow anyone's actual life. But the tension the book turns on is a real one. A small, close island. A group of incomers with their own rules. Locals who didn't ask for them. Everybody knows everybody's business, and yet nobody is telling the police anything useful.
That gave me somewhere to put DS Mo Uddin. Sending Mo to Arran was the decision that shaped the book. He's a long way from home, and the weather is against him.
