Agatha Raisin Companion (5 page)

Carsely

The nearest station is Moreton-in-Marsh. From there Agatha drives up through Bourton-on-the-Hill on the A44, then turns off the main road to drive into the fictional village of
Carsely.

Moreton is situated on the other side of the Fosse Way (A44) from Blockley, ten miles from Evesham and six miles from Moreton-in-Marsh.

Mircester

Agatha’s nearest, fictional, town and the site of the frequently visited police station where her friend Bill Wong is based. An old town with cobbled streets which is
dominated by a great medieval abbey, it boasts a few restaurants, pubs and a nightlife which includes the Happy Night Club, in a dingy back street. It was here that murder victim Jessica Bradley
enjoyed her last night out before she was found dead in a ditch off the dual carriageway outside the town.

Agatha finds offices in the town when she sets up her agency in
Deadly Dance.

Ancombe

The fictional village of Ancombe is Carsely’s closest neighbour and is two miles from Carsely. Ancombe’ was one of those Cotswold villages about the size of
Broad Campden that seemed too perfect to be true. Very small, but with an old church in the centre, thatched cottages, beautiful gardens and everything with a manicured air.’
(Murderous
Marriage)

The Carsely Ladies’ Society often socializes with the Ancombe Ladies’ Society and attends their amateur shows and events. Mabel Smedley the wife of victim Robert in
Perfect
Paragon,
is a member who lives in the village.

Ancombe has a village shop and a church, but little else. The local pub, The Feathers, serves very good food, but is very pricey. Agatha first encounters it in
Quiche of Death
when the
Cummings-Brownes join her for dinner there and she foots the bill.

It is also the site of the eighteenth-century ancient spring, fashioned in the shape of a skull, which leads to two murders in
Wellspring of Death.
A Miss Jakes had discovered the water
source in her garden and had it channelled through a pipe in her wall and into a fountain, to be used by the ‘weary traveller’. It is still thought to have restorative properties and is
well used by
passing walkers. After the Ladies’ Society gets heated about a water company’s plans to use the spring there, and Agatha is offered the PR job by
the same company, she walks to the village and finds a dead body.

Dembley

A fictional market town in Gloucestershire, which provided the setting for the fourth Raisin book,
Walkers of Dembley.
Agatha and James, posing as a married couple,
borrow a flat in Sheep Street belonging to Sir Charles Fraith. The walkers favour a pub called The Grapes, but there is another one called The Fleece. Terry and Peter, both members of the
ramblers’ group, work at a restaurant called The Copper Kettle. There is also a primary school where victims Jessica and Jeffrey worked with suspect Deborah.

Blockley

This picturesque village is ‘a few miles from Carsely’, across the A44 and then down a hill, and lies between
Moreton-in-Marsh and Evesham. The once-thriving mills have been turned into homes and the property prices are sky high. ‘The village is dominated by a square-towered church, and by Georgian
terraces of mellow Cotswold stone. The long, straggling main street used to be full of little shops, but only the many-paned shop windows, lovingly
preserved, remain to
show where they once stood.’
(Love from Hell)

Although an exceptionally pretty village, it remains off the tourist drag and receives little of the attention that Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton-on-the-Water attract.

There is a post-office-cum-general store, which Agatha and Charles visit to find the whereabouts of the ex-husband of murder victim Melissa Sheppard in
Love from Hell.
Charles bemoans the
fact that the road into the attractive village is ruined by trucks going to a nearby industrial estate.

Moreton-in-Marsh

A beautiful market town with the tree-lined Fosse Way, an old Roman military road, running through it. ‘Ever since the Abbot of Westminster, who owned the land,
decided to make use of the transport on the Fosse Way and a new Moreton was built in 1222, it has been a favourite shopping place for travellers, the wool merchants of medieval times being replaced
with tourists.’

King Charles I granted a charter for the market in 1638 and later stayed at the large pub, The White Hart, in the centre of the town.

Moreton-in-Marsh was used as a coaching station before the coming of the Oxford to Worcester railway in 1853 and now has a mainline train station, connecting to Paddington, which is the nearest
to Carsely. Hence it was the gateway to the Cotswolds
when Agatha first arrived, as well as the station Roy usually arrives at. Agatha enjoys shopping at the Tuesday
market and has the occasional lamb stew in The White Hart.

Ashton-Le-Walls

Ten miles outside Mircester, this small, fictional village is the site of the health farm, Hunters Field, where Jimmy Raisin stayed before wrecking Agatha’s wedding
to James in
Murderous Marriage.

Hebberden

A tiny, fictional village on the other side of Ancombe from Carsely. Nestling in a valley, the picturesque huddle of cottages is served by one pub and no shops. Agatha and
Paul Chatterton investigate a reported haunting at Ivy Cottage, a large thatched cottage in the village before the owner, a Mrs Witherspoon, dies.

Stow-on-the-Wold

A historic market town of mellow Cotswold stone, set high on a hill in Gloucestershire, four miles from Moreton-in-Marsh. Most of the houses date back to the sixteenth
century and it boasts one of the oldest pubs in England, the Royalist Inn, which incorporates the original building of the Eagle and Child, dating from the year 947.

The town is very touristy and its tiny central parking area is the scene of many a small victory over the visitors for Agatha. Her beloved masseur, Richard Rasdall, practises above the sweet
shop, The Honey Pot, which is run by his ‘pretty wife’, Lyn. Richard and Lyn are real people and The Honey Pot is a real sweet shop in Church Street.

Evesham

‘Cynics say Evesham is famous for dole and asparagus.’The River Avon runs through the town, famous for its fruit and vegetable trade, which nestles in the Vale
of Evesham and boasts many ancient churches and historical buildings. But it also has a sadder air and can present itself as a ‘down-at-heel town. Despite the increasing population, shops
keep closing up and the boards over the windows are decorated with old Evesham scenes by local artists, so that sometimes it seems a town of pictures and thrift shops.’ Agatha observes that
the
town seems to be full of ‘enormous, fecund women’ with pushchairs and leggings.

In
Wizard of Evesham,
Agatha and Charles visit the Almonry, a rambling fourteenth-century building which now houses the museum. Hairdresser Mr John runs a salon in the high street and
lives in a villa in Cheltenham Road, where Agatha is almost burned to death after his murder.

Kylie Stokes is found, by Agatha, floating in the swollen river there in
Day the Floods Came.
Her boyfriend runs the Hollywood Nights club in the town with his father. Harrison Peterson
is also killed while staying in the town in
Deadly Dance.

Herris Cum Magna

A tiny fictional village off the Stow-Burford road, where the Laggatt-Browns live in the manor house in
Deadly Dance.
‘The manor house itself was one of those
low, rambling Cotswold stone buildings that are much larger inside than they seem from the outside.’

Comfrey Magna

‘An odd, secretive-looking fictional village,’ built along a drove road near Carsely. All the houses are old and on the one thoroughfare, and most of the
inhabitants are almost as ancient as their homes. A Norman church, which Cromwell’s followers
robbed of its stained-glass windows, and a large, grey vicarage
dominate the village, which also has one small pub, called The Grunty Man. In
Spoonful of Poison,
Agatha helps the vicar by getting an A-list star to open the fête, but the jam-tasting
leads to chaos when the preserves are laced with a hallucinogenic drug.