I spent a lot of time in graveyards when I was a child.
Well, I guess it wasn’t a lot of time, but my mum had a thing about stopping at old cemeteries and walking along reading the headstones out loud to us, with suitable asides about the names, the dates and the mundane tragedy of death as experienced by complete strangers a century before.
So there are graveyards in the story I’m writing, and I added in another one when I was writing a scene today. Despite working on historical fiction, I was aided by Google maps – I knew exactly where I wanted the event to take place, around 300 years ago. I had a look at the street view of Duns to get a sense of the layout, and there directly across the road is a fabulous old cemetery, raised up above the road. What a perfect stage for a dramatic declaration.