Sarah has been travelling. Again…

Autumn, Keats’s season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, is in full force now. And, so far, I seem to have spent most of it travelling.

2024 was supposed to be a quiet year, but as we progress into autumn, I feel as if I haven’t yet caught up with myself.

But hey – we spend our lives writing about our character’s journey, don’t we?

So what’s the difference? Well, my journey covers actual miles, it’s a mix of business and pleasure, and although it’s inspiring, it is also exhausting.

Come with me

If you haven’t been able to get out and about much recently, buckle up and join me now as I relive my autumn journey.

My season of mists began with a writers’ retreat

In early October I joined six writers (plus some supportive partners) in a converted barn in the beautiful Dorset countryside. The weather wasn’t brilliant, but that only added more incentive to stay indoors and “get on with it”.

We started our week with a tour of the local vineyard. https://bridevalleyvineyard.com/  (Well, why not? It was literally a stone’s throw from us.)

Bride Valley Wines

We enjoyed the local white wines, and the bubbly. Very much. It was an unusual start to our retreat, but we all looked on it as inspirational.

More Mellow Fruitfulness

We discovered apple trees in the garden, and the owners said we were free to take what we wanted. So of course we did. We gathered a selection to make a simple dessert of stewed apples fresh from the trees, and custard. Scumptious!

However, our writing wasn’t impaired by these delicious distractions. If anything it spurred us on to achieve our goals (which we all did, by the way).

The journey in the season of mists

At the end of the retreat, I began a circuitous trip back to the Highlands, stopping with family and friends on the way.

And boy, had autumn kicked in! The trees were already turning to the golds and reds that make the woods glow in the sunlight.

Sadly, the sun was in hiding for this part of the trip, which made my photos pretty dull. So instead, here is Clive Perrin’s photo of a sweet chestnut tree in the New Forrest, courtesy of Wiki Commons.

But more of Hampshire later….

Last stop in Dorset

Kingston Lacy

This is beautiful Kingston Lacy, a Venetian Palace set in the English countryside. There is currently a lot of work going on in the grounds, so we just took a quick look around the house. I am always looking fat prospective settings for my Georgian and Regency romances.

Kingston Lacy is in the style of an Italian Palazzo and although the transformation mostly took place mid-19th century, which is outside my period, it is filled with paintings and furnishings that are just right.

Then Hampshire…

We made our way into Hampshire and Hinton Ampner, where the gardens were a delight: a wonderful place to relax and enjoy the peace and quiet.

Although it was only mid-October the National Trust staff and volunteers had further brightened the gardens with cheerful displays of pumpkins. They positively glowed in the rather overcast October daylight.

This house, too, provided great inspiration for me. Ralph Sutton inherited the house in 1935 and began work turning the Victorian building into a Regency Villa. A fire in 1960 destroyed much of Sutton’s work but he began again, painstakingly rebuilding his vision for a Regency home.

The result is charming, and the interiors are exactly the sort of place where my heroes and heroines can act out their stories. So the season of mists was definitely delivering…

And on….

We spent a few days with friends and drove to Bosham through the beautiful Hampshire countryside, where the trees were beginning to display their autumn colours, from deep greens through golden yellow and russet. Bosham itself is such a picturesque place: I always find myself thinking of swashbuckling adventures and smugglers.

An overnight stop in Derbyshire to collect Delphi, our newest family member, before setting off for Scotland, the autumn colours becoming even more pronounced as we travelled north.

We broke the journey overnight in the Borders, where our pet-friendly hotel was just perfect, with lots of crisp leaves to kick up in the grounds and the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey on the other side of the wall.

Then it was back to the lounge with its glowing log fires.

To the Highlands! Season of mists with no mist?

The last leg of our journey is the long slog of the A9 north to Inverness. (After Perth, the satnav says it’s104 miles to the next roundabout!)

At Inverness we head west for the coast and it is when we reach Glen Docherty, with its view of Loch Maree in the distance, that I know we are nearly home.

As we drove along beside Loch Maree I was surprised to see the rowan trees still full of berries, even though they had lost all their leaves. I managed to snap this picture as we drove past. I hope it might give you some impression of the wonderful colours.

And that’s it.

We are home now, for a short while. And talking of log fires, Delphi and I are very happy to be able to curl up in front of our own, for a while!

Sarah (& Delphi)