Locations in The Repentants with Kate Foster
The Repentants locations with Kate Foster
The Repentants is a historical thriller about two women banished in shame from Scotland to remote Iceland to atone for their sins during the 18th century’s age of exploration.
Book map of The Repentants
Book map of The Repentants
It begins in the village of St Monans, Fife. In the spring of 1790 Florrie, a wealthy heiress who had an affair, and Eliza, a salt serf who breached the Sabbath are forced to repent for their wrongdoings in the parish church, in front of everyone they know.
Book map of The Repentants
St Monans is a charming town on the Fife Coastal Trail. When I was considering locations for this novel, I was immediately drawn to St Monans because it was once the site of a saltworks.
Kate Foster
Book map of The Repentants
I visited the Fife coast several times with my family and we had lots of beach walks and ice creams but my mind drifted to what it would have been like hundreds of years ago when people were punished for their sins.
Book map of The Repentants
In 18th century Scotland, there was also a thriving coalmining and saltmaking industry along the coast. Some of the coal that was mined was used in the process of heating seawater to evaporate it into salt.
It made the business owners rich, but people working in the coal and salt industries were bound to their employers as serfs and had few freedoms.
Book map of The Repentants
St Monans has the remains of its saltpans as a heritage site as well as a windmill.
I wanted to use this picturesque setting as a contrast to the difficult lives my characters endured, and the bleak location where the women are sent to atone for their sins.
Book map of The Repentants
They travel to Iceland as part of a dodgy deal struck by Florrie’s husband Jonny to set up a saltworks in Reykjavik manned by convicts from a prison ship docked in the harbour. He wants to make his fortune and his name. But he also has other, sinister reasons for taking the women there.
The women endure a terrifying sea voyage to Reykjavik via Copenhagen which was the route ships travelled in those days.
What a huge contrast Copenhagen would have been to the tiny village they came from.
Book map of The Repentants
Book map of The Repentants
Copenhagen was lively, chaotic and full of opportunity. It had survived plague and fire and was becoming a major European city with institutions like banks and the Royal Danish Theatre.
But they do not stay long there and are transported to Reykjavik, further and further into the unknown.
Book map of The Repentants
At that time, Reykjavik was not even a town, in fact Iceland did not even have towns back then, just farms and homesteads. Reykjavik was a remote trading outpost, and the island had suffered famine, disease and volcanic eruptions. Iceland was remote from the rest of western Europe, but its fishing grounds were being exploited by foreign vessels and parties of Danish, French and British scientists were exploring it.
Book map of The Repentants
I visited Iceland in the summer of 2025 and was struck by three things. First, its uncanny similarity to Scotland – the sweeping landscapes were almost identical but not quite. That made me feel that my fictional characters would have felt like they were in a place oddly similar to home, yet a lifetime away.
Book map of The Repentants
Secondly, I found incredible solace from its barrenness in the National Museum of Iceland where I spent a morning among artefacts that my 18th century characters would have been familiar with. The was a reproduction of a traditional Icelandic home, as well as paintings of the exploration parties.
Book map of The Repentants
Thirdly, (and my characters would never have had the chance to do this!) I spent an afternoon at the Sky Lagoon where I relaxed in geothermal waters and had a glass of champagne and drank to the success of The Repentants and my quest to tell women’s stories. My characters in this book are all fictional, but I think women like them existed on the fringes of the explorers’ diaries yet never had the chance to record their lives.
Book Trail Boarding Pass: The Repentants
Insta:@katefosterauthor
