When a Place Becomes a Story
Ideas rarely arrive when I’m sitting at my desk. They appear while I’m walking in the mountains, following a forest track or wandering along the North Wales coast.
For me, the difficulty has never been finding ideas. I have more than I can reasonably do anything with, and that creates its own problem of procrastination and inertia. It has always been recognising which of them contains a story I want to tell.
I keep a list of ideas, some of which may become an essay, short story or full-length novel. Some will never see the light of day. Or maybe they will, when I get around to them.
They rarely arrive fully formed as a plot or a character. More often they begin with something that catches my attention and makes me want to know more.
One of those moments occurred at Dolwyddelan Castle in late 2025. It was overcast and it had been raining. The castle was damp and dark, with that sense of foreboding North Wales can acquire when the weather closes in.
I had visited Dolwyddelan many times before. Like so many places in North Wales, it is woven into the landscape so naturally that it almost becomes part of the mountains themselves. Yet on that particular day I wasn’t looking for a story. I had gone with my camera, hoping simply to spend a few hours photographing a place that has fascinated me for years.
As I wandered through the ruins, I found myself wondering less about battles and princes than about quieter things such as who had walked these corridors, who had been in these rooms, and what conversations had taken place that history had never recorded.
Much of history is about great events and famous names, but I have always been more interested in the ordinary lives taking place beneath them, most of which disappeared without leaving any record at all.
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, or a gathering of scholars, or even Professor Owain Morgan. None of those things existed yet.
What I carried home was simply a question that refused to disappear. Worthwhile questions follow you home. They remain while I’m making tea, walking the dog or — as seems to happen surprisingly often — taking my morning shower.
Over the following weeks I found myself reading 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.
Looking back now, it seems obvious that the novel began there. At the time it felt nothing like the beginning of a book, just an enjoyable afternoon spent walking around an old castle with my camera.
Writers sometimes speak about finding stories. I am no longer sure that is the right phrase for me. More often, I think, I stumble across something that makes me curious and follow it to see where it leads. Sometimes it leads nowhere. Occasionally, as it did at Dolwyddelan, it becomes a novel.
I’m learning not to dismiss those moments when something catches my attention. I wasn’t searching for a novel that cold afternoon at Dolwyddelan Castle; I was simply curious, and The Silence of the White Shadow became the way of exploring it.