A Look at Rydding Village

Rydding Village is an imaginary place in an imaginary world, but I found some inspiration from the real world that helped me develop the village. The main inspiration for the village, its setting, and the way it’s laid out is a village called Castle Combe in the Cotswolds in England. You may have seen this village because it’s often used as a movie set. It played a lot of roles in the Doctor Doolittle movie starring Rex Harrison. More recently, it played Tristan’s home village (or parts of it) in Stardust. You get a good look at the village near the end of the movie when he returns after his adventures. I started with the same general layout, then added, subtracted, and moved things around as I needed them for the plot, to the point that when I look at my original reference photos, I no longer think they look much like the village in my head.

Since I started writing the series, I’ve been visiting the Museum of Frontier Cultures in Virginia to research life in the general time periods that are similar to the world of the books. This open-air museum includes houses and buildings brought from places in Europe where settlers to this area of Virginia came from, in order to show the cultures they brought with them, as well as buildings from different eras in this area. Some of the buildings matched my ideas of buildings in the books.

Click on the thumbnails for bigger photos and captions explaining how these images relate to the book.