Ideas rarely arrive when I’m sitting at my desk. They appear when I’m walking in the mountains, following a forest track or wandering along the North Wales coast.
I’m never short of ideas. In fact, I probably have more than I can ever deal with. The challenge is recognising which of them is worth pursuing.
They seldom arrive fully formed, with a plot and cast of characters already waiting. Usually there is just a spark, something that catches my attention and arouses my natural curiosity.
One of those moments occurred at Dolwyddelan Castle in late 2025.
It was an overcast, damp day, and the place had that sense of enigmatic drama I have experienced many times in North Wales. From its vantage point high on a ridge of volcanic rock, the castle seems almost to be part of the natural landscape.
Built between 1210 and 1240 by Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, or Llywelyn the Great, it was intended to guard the mountain road between the Conwy valley and the uplands of Meirionnydd. In 1283, after months of siege, it fell to Edward I during his campaign to extinguish Welsh independence. For a time it held a garrison, but eventually the soldiers moved to the coast and the castle fell silent.
As I wandered through the ruins, taking photographs, I found myself wondering less about battles and princes than about quieter things.
Who had walked these corridors? Who had stood waiting in these rooms? What conversations had taken place here that history never recorded?
Much of history is about great events and famous names, but I have always been drawn instead to the countless ordinary lives that unfolded beneath them and disappeared almost as soon as they were lived.
It was somewhere during that walk that another thought appeared.
What if a discovery made within these walls challenged not only accepted history, but the people who found it?
I didn’t leave Dolwyddelan with an outline for a novel. I didn’t know there would be a medieval manuscript, a gathering of scholars or even Professor Owain Morgan. What I carried home was a question that refused to disappear.
Over the following weeks, I read about medieval Wales, Victorian scholarship, historical forgery, antiquarian societies and the growing fascination with archaeology during the nineteenth century. One question led naturally to another until, gradually, the world of The Silence of the White Shadow began to emerge.
The photographs I had taken that afternoon became part of the process. Looking at them took me back to the castle, to the landscape around it and to the questions that had occurred to me as I walked through the ruins. I realised that this is often how I imagine stories. I see the world first, and then begin to wonder who might inhabit it, what might have happened there and why.
The castle had provided the spark. Everything else grew from that.
I’ve learned not to dismiss those quiet moments of curiosity. I wasn’t searching for a novel that cold afternoon at Dolwyddelan Castle. I had simply gone there with my camera and started wondering about the people who had passed through those rooms before me.
The Silence of the White Shadow became my way of finding out where those questions might lead.