The Drowning Place – Map Monday

Submitted: 13th April 2026

The Drowning Place

Where are we going?

A fictional village called Edenscar but the other locations are more than real! Clearly set in the rugged, raw landscape of the Peak District. This is an unforgiving land where there are farms, large open spaces and remote villages. Anything can happen here and in this novel, plenty does.

Bit worrying to find out that there really is a place called Dark Peak…..

The Drowning Place - Map Monday

Location map of The Drowning Place

boarding pass new

Location map of The Drowning Place

The setting:

The Peak District s0 think remote fields, winding roads, and dark ditches….

“Rain had turned Snake Pass into one long hiss.”

“Behind him the Upper Derwent Valley run into folds and pleats toward Win Hill. The summer was long gone, but it wasn’t yet winter with its rash of brown grasses. bracken and bilberries, the sun slung low in the sky.”

Peak District

Location map of The Drowning Place

Review

Sarah Hilary crime supremo with added supernatural activity? Bring it on1

Three linked deaths in a village at the heart of the Peak District. A link to a coach crash many years earlier where a bus veered off the road and everyone on board drowned. Everyone, that is, except Joseph Ashe.

Sarah Hilary is a very skilled writer – that’s a given. What she brings to the table in this novel is something on another level to be honest.

The tagline of the novel is “when you dig up the dead, expect to get your hands dirty” – and that just tells you all you need to know. This is a gritty crime novel that takes you deep in the mud and bracken of the Peak District. But it takes you into a bleaker world where nothing is as it seems – a Peak District that acts as a ghostly characters itself. This is no summer holiday location!

The mix of characters, setting and supernatural really is something to treasure.