Charlotte Betts

Last May I fell in love with the castle on Eilean Donan in Scotland so this month I visited Corfe Castle, in Dorset. It was a boiling hot day but the view of the village and surrounding landscape from the top of the hill was well worth the effort in the heat.

In the 17th century, ‘London’ was the City of London. Within its stone walls, it had grown into a bustling, overcrowded residential and commercial centre. As the population grew, space was at a premium, and storey was piled on storey. Tall, jettied timber houses overhung narrow streets. It was this pattern of building that made the Great Fire of London in 1666 so hard to control and led to the loss of 80% of the city.

I’ve recently returned from a holiday/research trip to the Highlands of Scotland where I fell in love with the glorious scenery. The Scottish weather is notoriously unpredictable and, true to form, the first day was so cold my fingers felt frostbitten, the second so wet I nearly drowned but after that it was so hot I narrowly avoided sunstroke!

As a student of Fashion Design back in the late sixties, my fellow students and I regularly haunted the halls of the V & A Museum for inspiration. Many years have passed since then and life has taken a different direction but I still find the V & A a wonderful place to research for my writing. 

The decaying grandeur of the abandoned Indian palaces and forts is impossibly romantic. When I walked through the echoing rooms I imagined I could hear the whispers of times long ago. It was this that inspired me to write The Palace of lost Dreams.