Posted by Pat Bryan on March 25, 2007 at 20:52:16 from 64.229.9.12:
In Reply to: broad highway once more posted by ken bryant on March 16, 2007 at 21:59:44:
Hi Ken - some while ago, Julia did a photographic essay visiting a number of places that JF used in his books (it's on the Main Page). I don't know whether she did any more exploring than she writes about. It seems to me that the little hut in TBH was about a couple of miles from the "Bull" - you remember Peter going down into the valley and then following the stream for quite a way and finding the hut, then meeting up with The Ancient, and going some way with him, back up the slope, along the road and then coming to The Bull. We can't be sure, of course, that such a place ever existed outside JF's imagination, although I'm sure that we can all think of places in our boyhood (and girlhood, Julia!)that might have served. I grew up in West Wickham in Kent, and the Springpark Woods had a little stream that descended a hill through the trees, and then opened out into a little plain where we played, and I could imagine Peter's hut being there. Mind you, it was a fair trek to the nearest pub (The Swan, an old coaching house), but anyway I hadn't read Farnol in those pre-war days.
If you should read Murder By Nail, and happen to be Portscatho in Cornwall, you can do a similar detective search, since JF used places and buildings there in his book - even going so far as to have his hero rent the same house that JF and his family lived in for part of the war!
Pat