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Yes, in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 1136 Historia Regum Britanniae ("The History of the Kings of Britain") Avalon is the place where King Arthur is taken to recover from his wounds after his last battle at Camlann, and where his sword Caliburn (Excalibur) was forged.

They translate it as the Isle of apples (from Welsh aval for apple) and it is also the Isle of the Blessed.

As a celtic speaker, a river is also an aibhainn, pronounced avar, aber in welsh. So it could just mean narrow river. they often settled where there was fresh water, like rivers, and the 'confluence' or join of two or more bodies of water has great spiritual significance and power.

Think also of the Lady of the lake, it was not really a lake, the are around there is low lying marsh that has gradually become filled in over time as people reclaim farmland, and water levels rise and fall. there are some sunken villages on the coasts of england and wales where people have gone diving and seen them preserved underwater.

5 saints came from there, including Patrick and Bridget, and so it has been sacred throughout the centuries by celt and christian alike.

The novel Mists of Avalon made it famous--and it certainly is misty.

You remember the trend for fake furs back in the day--well, they were REAL in the sense that they came from these giant 4-6 foot long rodents from south america called a coypu which they imported and tried to farm, til they escaped. imagine running into one of those in the marshes. my friend nearly wrecked her sports car when we were driving home early one evening. if it had been night we would most likely have been killed. it just popped out of the fog, out of the water and up onto the road. Damn near died of shock, it was like a horror film.


My friend John, an EMT worker with NO hint of interest in the supernatural, went to Glastonbury with his wife and 3 young daughters for their second honeymoon, and got a suite of 2 rooms. They put the girls in the adjoining room, and settled down for the night.

Mary woke up because she heard her youngest girl crying, having nightmares. She tried to calm her down and console her, but the girl was beside herself. So she went back into the bedroom to wake John to try to have a word with her to get her to settle down.

Meantime, John was in bed, half awake, snuggling up to his wife, who seemed to be absolutely freezing cold, trying to warm her up from head to toe.

Mary went into the room, and saw her husband snuggled up to a woman with dark hair in the bed.

She was stunned, and started to yell and turned the light on. The woman was blue in the face. Mary thought she was someone ill who had mistaken the room and come in because they had forgot to lock the door. She was a nurse, and was just about to start calming down and about to try CPR.

Then John who had jumped a foot when his wife had turned the light on and was screaming at him, damn near fainted when he half sat up and saw the freezing cold woman he had his arms around wasn't his wife, but a blue wizened looking woman.

She evaporated into mist and vanished right in front of their eyes. They literally grabbed the kids and coats and shoes and keys and for the car, went straight back home to Bristol, about 15 miles up the road, and had the hotel send their stuff onto them.

When they asked later, if anything odd had ever happened in the room, they were told that a woman had died there of heart problems many years before.

When they asked their daughter what she was dreaming about that had upset her so, she said a blue lady was coming to hurt them.

Like I said, I believe the story because John could not have been a less imaginative or superstitious person and he and his wife told the story word for word the same from their perspectives.

When he heard I was moving there, he was like, well, sorry if I never come to visit, but I am NEVER even driving through there again.

My friend the caretaker of the college I worked at told me much later that other people had had the same experience at that hotel.

Again, he was a very stolid farm type, living on land that once belonged to the abbey. People were always having accidents outside his house because they saw a monk, swerved to avoid it, and would hit a tree or wall.

He had warned me that the house filled with incense on high holy days, and sure enough, it did often enough, and once or twice, I sort of thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

One night at Christmas that year, after choir practice, we were all in his living room having hot spiced cider and cake, when the figure of a monk came in through one wall, no door, the solid stone wall, and out the other wall opposite, which was the blazing fireplace!

We jumped about ten feet and legged it out of there, Two of my colleagues were science teachers, one a math teacher, and we ALL saw it.

He always reasoned it was like a time warp, that the spirits were just doing what they always did and that the thin veil between the living and the dead would occasionally shred. He said once in a while he had the feeling they saw him and his family too, and took them for spirits also.

Of course, the high holy days of the church, like christmas and halloween, also coincide with the great celtic festivals, solstice and samhain, so there is a lot of powerful energy going around generally.

Glamis and Sterling are like that, there just seems to be a sort of rippling current of energy. Certain parts of Warwick Castle too.

Inverness is VERY cool and very lovely, if you can get over the Loch Ness monster tourist hype. A lot of the wildnerness is still unspoiled. Best time to go is autumn or spring between easter and the summer vacation there, when the schools are out, but in Scotland you can have snow even in April so best to be prepared for bad weather.

Though having said that, the year we walked Hadrian's wall, we didn't need a coat the whole time we were there, and it was mid-March, with all the new lambs bouncing all over the place in our back yard. we spent 3 weeks another year on the western isles, Lewis, Harris, the Uists, Barra, plus Mull and Iona, and never saw a drop of rain the whole time apart from the day we arrived from Ireland, and the day we left.

So yes, definitely the UK/Ireland is the place to go if you like gothic romance.

Sounds great. We'll be moving there in a couple of weeks, if all goes well. Looking forward to all of it.

Wow, moving-where to exactly?
Lucky you! Many blessings!

Can't say for sure where at this time. We'd like to buy a bookshop, so everything hinges on that prospect. Hope we get it and can make a go of it. It would give me a chance to collect a lot of Gothics.

VERY cool, best of luck with it!

It sounds like a real adventure, and I have to admit, I have always wanted my own bookstore!

So many books, so little time....

It occurs to me that an old lighthouse on the coast of Maine might make a suitable locale for a gothic. I'd be surprised if it hasn't been done already.

There must be lots of old houses lost out in the country in New England that would lend themselves to stories, especially during the winter when their isolation is even more pronounced.

Another idea -- islands off the coast. Somehow it seems more believable that some eccentric long ago might have built a European-style castle on a dramatic island setting than on the mainland of the States. Besides, islands are fun because they feel removed from the world, more make-believe.

The book I'm writing (Twisted Oaks) is set on an island....in the Louisiana bayous. The house was built there by an eccentric for his daughter as a wedding gift. Through supernatural circumstances the daughter ends up marrying a man other than her intended and a Family Curse follows him. It's more of a horror gothic than a gothic romance...the lead characters are twin boys (one of which is a werewolf) who are the grandchildren of the eccentric's daughter. The isolation of the island surrounded by endless miles of tangled bayou country has been a fun metaphor for the state of events that transpire at Twisted Oaks. I chose this setting for the precise reason you mentioned...it has allowed me to create a self sustaining world all its own that is not governed by rules of the outside world. (and I owe quite a bit of inspiration to Dark Shadows of course. Collinwood has always seemed to me to be more of a state of mind than an actual place).

I came across a book that may interest people wanting a New England setting. I didn't get too far into it, but someone else may like it.

The book is called "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare and it is sometimes marketed as a young adult book. I think it could be considered as much a Gothic romance as anything else I have seen posted on this site. It's about a young woman in the 1600s who comes to America and is accused of being a witch, mostly because of her intelligence and independent ways (of course!). There are three men interested in her, but which one really loves her?