My posts in June featured the City of Exeter, the setting of my second Lady Apollonia Medieval Mystery, Plague of a Green Man. First, I described how living in Exeter had inspired me to write this story and set it in that city in the year 1380. My last post dealt with the history of Exeter and some of its surviving medieval buildings which played a role in the book. Now, I will speak to the ancient city of Exeter and its location in the County of Devon on the River Exe as shown on the map above.
The River Exe has it source in North Devon in what is now the Exmoor National Park. It flows south through Exeter and widens into the Exe Estuary before it reaches Lyme Bay in the English Channel by the present town of Exmouth. Dartmoor, the first national park in England, lies to the West of the Exe Estuary, and it is there that that Plague of a Green Man begins.
Brandon Landow, the Pardoner in my stories, finds himself lost in one of the infamous fogs of Dartmoor while riding his faithful mare, “Absolution”. The Pardoner has been told that he is to meet someone at Grimspound which is at the far left of the map shown above. Unknown to him, however, Grimspound is a barren sight, the ruin of a Bronze Age settlement, as shown in the image on the right. Before Brandon can get near Grimspound, he is enveloped by the blinding Dartmoor fog, made famous in Victorian times as the setting for the Sherlock Holmes novel Hound of the Baskervilles. In desperation, Landow follows a stream flowing eventually to the village Lustleigh where he gains refuge in the village church from the disorientating fog.
Several villages to the south and east of Exeter also play a role in my story. On the map above, two places are important, Exmouth and Beer, both facing Lyme Bay and the English Channel. Exmouth in medieval times had two ecclesiastical parishes, Withycombe Raleigh to the west and Littleham to the east as shown on the map.
The villains in my story are members of the Falford Family whose manor is in the parish of Withycombe Raleigh, and some of the action in the story takes place at their manor. Other characters, Adam Braund and his friend Eric Aunk, spend some time at Adam’s home in Littleham parish and also on the River Exe where Adam has a boat used for shipping stone to Exeter to put the finishing touches on Exeter’s 14th century cathedral church.
Beer is a village to the east of Exmouth on the coast of Devon. It is surrounded by picturesque white cliffs as shown in the picture on the left and is important for two reasons in Plague of a Green Man. Its quarry caves have supplied stone since Roman times and were an important source of stone for Exeter Cathedral, largely completed by the time of my story, 1380. Some Beer stone was still being shipped by water for the Cathedral Image Screen on the west front of the cathedral. 
The other notable thing about Beer was its smugglers’ cove and caves which were once used to store contraband goods. Smuggling by medieval gangs was common, particularly in Devon and Cornwall, so I had to weave that bit of history into my story.