One of the joys (and frustrations) of writing a novel is that what you set out to do isn’t always what you end up doing. It wasn’t my intention to necessarily write a gothic horror and since the publication of The Loney I’ve been asking myself how it became one. As far as I can make out, the answer lies in the landscape that first inspired me.

Silverdale lies about a third of the way around the curve of Morecambe Bay, and like many places in that area, it changes constantly at the whim of the tide. The sea can be a mile out across the mudflats or it can brim against the inland flood defences. A channel here today might be gone tomorrow. Such is the strength of the water that it can leave behind great piles of heaved-up stone shaped to its swell. It’s a dangerous place. The weather quickly turns. Distances are hard to judge. It’s easy to walk out just a little too far on to the sands and hear them shifting and sucking around you as if the whole place might collapse at any moment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Changes at the whim of the tide’ … danger sign at Morecambe Bay. Photograph: Don McPhee/The Guardian

The names Helm Crag, Dungeon Ghyll, Wetherlam, Blencathra, Rothay: they were straight out of Middle Earth

Perhaps in some ways it was inevitable that somewhere like this would be the foundation of my first novel. Ever since childhood, I’d spent time in the north’s wild places and am still drawn to them as an adult. I may be looking back on those lunches hunkered down behind a stone wall in the rain or those interminable trudges up Skiddaw or Scafell Pike with a little more affection than I felt at the time, but I clearly remember that there was an excitement to it all, not least the danger of high paths and steep ridges.

It was the names too. For a 10-year-old boy obsessed with Tolkien, it felt as though we were often walking into another world. Helm Crag, Dungeon Ghyll, Wetherlam, Blencathra, Rothay: they were straight out of Middle Earth. I liked the way they looked on the map and the way they sounded in the mouth. Pikes, fells, haggs, slacks, holms and wrays; the north is mapped with bleakly beautiful words. There’s something about the muscular imported Nordic monosyllables that not only capture the appearance of a place, but also the feeling of it somehow. There is something dark and lonely in the long vowel of tarn. Something almost onomatopoeic about beck. And what word would you use for the shattered face of a mountainside, if not scar?

It was the same lexicon I used when I was creating the various locations in The Loney too. Coldbarrow, Little Hagby, Brownslack Wood, Moorings are all names constructed from an Old English and Old Norse wordstock that grounds them firmly in the rural north.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A landscape of co-existing opposites’ … Skiddaw summit. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The landscape was one of ​co-existing opposites: buried and unearthed, permanent and transitory, real and unreal

But it wasn’t only the evocative toponyms or the menace of the place that I found fascinating, it was the sense that the landscape of Morecambe Bay seemed so rich with stories, all of them held at a tantalising distance. Who was the Quaker after whom Quaker’s Stang, the pathway across the dyke, was named? Who was Jenny Brown of Jenny Brown’s Point, where the chimney from an old copper smelt still remains? Gibraltar Farm, with its sheaf of ancient standing stones, probably commemorates the British capture of that strategic peninsula in 1704, but who knows? Wolf House looks across the bay to the woody headland where the last wolf in England was reputedly killed, the motto on the coat of arms above the door perhaps a reply to a now forgotten dispute: homo homini lupus – “man is a wolf to his fellow man”.

It was this lingering-on of names and legends that made the place seem haunted in many ways. A place made for ghost stories. What is a ghost, after all, but the past enduring in a strange and incomprehensible form? Something both living and dead. The landscape that I saw and felt when I was writing The Loney was one of co-existing opposites: then and now, buried and unearthed, permanent and transitory, real and unreal. I had come to it unconsciously, circuitously, but any story I told there would be gothic in spirit and subject to these unsettling distortions. In this place, truth, certainty and faith would always be as insubstantial as the sands.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A place made for ghost stories’ … tree silhouetted at dusk on Humphrey Head Point, Cumbria. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Alamy

Extract

If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney – that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter. Dull and featureless it may have looked, but the Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Coldbarrow – a desolate spit of land a mile off the coast – into an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. Unlucky fishermen were blown off course and ran aground. Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint.

More about The Loney

Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Read more

Hurley suspends the story in a limbo between the supernatural and the merely strange: it is not clear whether the fantastic has occurred, or whether characters are mad, or which of these would be worse. Where the supernatural is most explicitly suggested (a hawthorn blooming well before its season, say), it is done almost in passing, so that one may begin to doubt one’s own experience of the novel. This putting out of a hand to tug the reader into the text is at the crux of the gothic, and is as rare as it is delicious. Sarah Perry

Read the full review.

Buy the book

The Loney is published by John Murray at £7.99 and is available at the Guardian bookshop at £6.99.