The Heirloom locations with Julie Brooks

Submitted: 17th September 2025

The Heirloom locations with Julie Brooks

Witchery on the Downlands…

The Heirloom Julie Brooks

The Heirloom location map

Stories usually sneak up on me, an idea here, another there, until one day I have several characters, a gestational plot and some themes flitting about in my head. In the case of The Heirloom, I began thinking I’d like to write a story about a ‘witch’. Not one set during a witch hunt, or steeped in big magic, more the tale of a historical wise woman who finds herself mired in trouble because of her profession. This to me, would have been the experience of a long tradition of healers and psychics.

Church (c) Julie Brooks

The Heirloom location map

A story needs to be set somewhere and I discarded several British locations before discovering during my research that Sussex has a long history of ‘witchery’, yet not a single person was executed for it. Apparently, the denizens of Sussex valued their wise women too much to want to kill them. The fact that some of my distant ancestors hailed from East Sussex, having emigrated to Queensland in the mid 1800s, provided another connection and an additional reason to fly 10,000 miles. A family secret about one of my Sussex ancestors marrying her deceased husband’s nephew, inspired another story thread.

George Inn (c) Julie Brooks

The Heirloom location map

A week driving about East and West Sussex in 2022 with my patient husband, Vincent, provided plenty of research material. Rather than naming a specific place in the novel, I decided to allow elbow room to indulge my imagination. But I will say that the village where Philadelphia and her mother Susanna live is largely based on the village of Alfriston. The King’s Head Inn and the churchyard in the novel are modelled on The George Inn and St Andrew’s church, and the Cuckmere River plays its part in the story too.

St Andrew’s church (c) Julie Brooks

The Heirloom location map

We spent a delightful day at the Weald and Downland Living Museum near Chichester in West Sussex. This village of reconstructed houses from all over Sussex, helped me picture the cottage and garden where my main historical character, Philadelphia, lives with her wise woman mother, Susanna; the house that my contemporary character, Mia, inherits.

Cuckmere River (c) Julie Brooks

Once I returned home to Australia, I pored over my photographs, studied maps of the area and read local histories, plus numerous historical articles about Sussex witchcraft available from the wonderful sussexrecordssociety.org.

The Heirloom location map

As well as her sideline as a wise woman, I gave Philadelphia a more respectable trade as a milliner. Two hundred years ago, clothing was handmade and hats were obligatory. Many women worked in this field, including several generations of my own ancestors in Wales, England and Australia.

So, I researched the work and premises of tailors and milliners in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to create a vivid picture of Philadelphia’s life with her tailor husband, Jasper. (One of the joys of writing historical fiction is researching the characters’ wardrobes.

The Heirloom location map

Jindalee

For the contemporary settings, I chose to set the story in Brisbane and southern Queensland. this is where I lived as a child, and the region to which all my ancestors emigrated. The Brisbane River is a powerful presence throughout the city. It winds throughout the suburbs, and the tropical architecture is quite different to other Australian capitals. I spent many holidays there in the decades that followed, so it remains vivid in my memory. For Mia’s childhood home, I actually conjured the riverside suburb of Jindalee, with its bushy feel, where an aunt of mine lived.

The Heirloom location map

The landscape of the granite belt in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales is rugged. It would have been quite forbidding for the European newcomers.

Today, Girraween, Bald Rock and Boonoo Boonoo National Parks are popular hiking and camping spots. However, as I wrote I pictured my farming and gold-mining forebears who settled in the region. The massive boulders, striking rock formations and dense bushland provide a strong story contrast with the rolling green downlands of East Sussex. To find out why that might be important, you will have to read the novel.