Although Wild Fell and Blackmore Island are fictional locales, as is the town of Alvina, it was inspired in part by The Corran, the nineteenth-century estate of Alexander MacNeil of Wiarton, Ontario, which lies in ruins in a forest on the outskirts of that town, on a cliff above Colpoys Bay. I visited the ruins in January of 2012 with a friend in order to get a sense of the locale, and how it might possibly play into the novel I was writing. I was able to take two or three quick pictures of the ruins before my camera shut down completely and I lost the use of my cellular phone. While I do not ascribe any supernatural influence to either of those two things, I was relieved that both the camera and the phone promptly resumed their proper functions when we left the site of the ruins and returned to town.