Night Walking on the Cumbrian Fells – The Real Research Behind The Barn
The Barn, book 4 in the Cumbria Crime series I write with Joel Hames, is set in rural west Cumbria, and quite a bit of the action takes place on the fells at night. So I went out on the Cumbrian fells in the dark to find out what that's really like.
I should explain.
I was doing location research for The Barn. And I had decided, in my infinite wisdom, that the best way to understand the experience of the fells at night was to go out and live it.
You might wonder whether I'd thought this through. You would be right to wonder.
What is night walking on the fells really like?
Night walking in the Cumbrian fells is one of those activities that sounds poetic and atmospheric when you read about it. A headtorch, a clear sky, the silence of the mountains. Frosty grass sparkling underfoot. Owls.
What it actually is, is a very good way of discovering that fells you thought you knew very well by day become entirely different places in the dark.
Paths disappear. The shape of the hills changes. Landmarks that felt obvious in daylight vanish completely. And the silence, which I had romanticised, is not quite the comfortable silence of a living room after everyone's gone to bed. It's the silence of a place that is extremely large and doesn't particularly care about you.
The bog
I did have a headtorch. I did have proper footwear. I am not a complete reckless disaster.
But I did walk into a bog.
In my defence, it looked like normal ground. In the dark, bogs and non-bogs look remarkably similar. The only difference is that one of them tries to steal your boot.
I retrieved the boot. I carried on. And I came back with exactly the understanding of night fell walking that I needed to write about it convincingly: it is simultaneously beautiful and slightly terrifying, and the people who do it regularly are either very brave or have better spatial memory than me.
Probably both.
Is it worth walking the fells at night?
The fells in the dark do have a strange magic about them, though. Away from any light pollution, the sky is extraordinary. And there's something about being the only person moving through a landscape that makes you intensely aware of it. Every sound matters. Every shadow means something.
It turned out to be very useful for writing Zoe and her team navigating the same landscape in the dark, and rather less certain of themselves than they'd like to be.
(Zoe didn't walk into a bog. I made sure of that. She has enough to deal with.)
The fell barns of Cumbria
In The Barn, a body is found at a remote barn: the kind of structure dotted across Cumbria that has sheltered shepherds and their flocks for centuries. Isolated. Old. Unreachable by road. The kind of place that doesn't show up on a map until you're already there.
And if you're out there at night, you won't see it coming until the torch picks it out of the dark.
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New to the series? Start with The Harbour, or get the prequel novella The Castle free.
