Peter Benson: A trip down Watery Lane

His novels introduce the Gothic tradition to the West Country. He gives Christian House a guided tour of local haunts

Peter Benson is entranced by the lush gifts that Somerset offers (Abbie Traylor-Smith)

'Ashbrittle looked exhausted, almost dead, a stranded place." Welcome to Peter Benson's Somerset, circa 1901, the setting for his Edwardian-Gothic tale Isabel's Skin. Having picked me up at Taunton station, that once pivotal point in Brunel's Great Western Railway, Benson is giving me a whistle-stop tour of his hidden Somerset. Thankfully it's more welcoming in the present day.

"This is where I did my tractor test," he tells me as we come up the road to Ashbrittle. "I drove down here and drove back again. That was it." The lanes, churches, country fables and legends form an effective backdrop for Benson's particularly English dramas. The dank hedgerows and copses prove portentous in their gloom while scudding clouds and honeyed masonry herald salvation.

Ashbrittle has no pub or store. "There was a vicar who closed them all down," says Benson, who lived as a teenager here in the sweltering summer of 1976, a period he drew on in his previous novel Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke. There is little more than a single street flanked by cottages hove out of the region's red-tinged hamstone. As we pull up, the sun streaks over the green. We shake off that distinctive van smell and walk over to the churchyard.

This unassuming village is literally rooted in England's ancient history, due to the famous 3,000-year-old yew tree in its graveyard. "Wherever they live, in Somerset or Northumberland, country people are country people. They do their thing and they work hard," says Benson as we go through the church doors.

In Isabel's Skin, David Morris, a quiet book-valuer from Highbury in North London arrives to assess the library of the recently deceased Lord Buff-Orpington in the local castellated pile. When David glimpses a screaming woman at the window of a cottage out in the woods, the story takes a rather unbibliophilic turn. Benson's story is a spine-tingler complete with macabre twist and dastardly villain, but one shot through with musings on the beauty of our bucolic vistas. "I would never compare myself to Stoker," he says. "I'm not worthy of doing up his shoelaces. Or Shelley's." However, he admits to having revelled in bringing the Gothic tradition to the West Country novel.

Twenty-five years ago, Benson's debut, The Levels, found extraordinary success and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. A coming-of-age love story, it drew on his time learning basket making on the Somerset levels. He wrote it in Lyme Regis, where, in the 1980s, he had an elder statesman of letters on his doorstep: John Fowles. "I dropped a copy through his letter box. He used to come into the basket shop," says Benson. "Then he wrote back, 'You've got something. If you want to come and say hello, drop in.'"

Benson became Fowles's gardener, tending to his wild, rambling grounds overlooking the Cob. "John was very adept at creating this myth around himself, but he was also very quiet, very shy, and didn't really want a lot of company. He was very kind to me." However, Benson knows more than most the precarious nature of the writer's life. After seven novels he remained out of print for more than a decade, until his return last year.

We leave Ashbrittle and course down to the Globe Inn in the hamlet of Appley. "The room behind, in there," he points as we go outside, "used to be the landlady Mrs Endicot's living room. And you stepped in there at your peril. She was a formidable woman." We perch on the entrance benches and sip our drinks.

I ask why he thinks there are so few country novelists: "There are never a lot. Each generation has one or two writers who are writing about the English countryside," says Benson; he cites Laurie Lee, Stella Gibbons and H E Bates as past examples. "But when it comes to urban novels, at any one time there are hundreds of them knocking about. I don't know why it is."

At this point, a woman on a thoroughbred mare draws up alongside. "Hi there," says Benson. "Do you want me to hold your horse?" The grateful rider jumps down, hands over the reins, and pops in for a glass of cider. "Sorry, what was the question?" asks Benson.

Such peculiar encounters remain at the heart of his writing. I mention, as we drive on refreshed, that I had enjoyed The Shape of Clouds, the last of his novels before his wilderness years. In it, an old seadog and an ageing Hollywood actress fall in love in the briny haven of a Cornish cove. So was the film star based on anyone? Benson smiles. "I was living in Lyme, making baskets. One day the bell rang. There was a woman standing there and she said, 'I wanna buy a basket.' It was Lauren Bacall." he laughs. Benson asked if he knew her from somewhere. "She said, 'Do you?'"

"I think there's a ford here, which could be fun," says Benson suddenly. We are driving on Watery Lane at the bottom of Bullock Field Hill. It looks less like a ford and more like a rippling river. "Shall we do it?" laughs Benson and puts his foot down. We careen through the stream, both whooping, round the corner and up, bumper crunching, on to terra firma, a hundred metres later. Unusual topography remains key to Benson's storytelling, and in Isabel's Skin he moves from these Somerset nooks to grimy London and then out to the broad canvas of Norfolk.

"I always liked that reedy landscape. Very big skies," he says. "Skies here are really small, everything is closed in. So I wanted something that was wide." As we turn back to Taunton, he tells me that the third in what he calls his "loose Ashbrittle trilogy" is already under way. For now, it appears that Benson remains entranced by Somerset's lush gifts.

Isabel's Skin, By Peter Benson

Alma Books, £14.99

"I should not have crossed that bridge and walked the final mile and a half. I should have turned around and returned to London, and I would have avoided the pain and death. I would have remained the pleased top-floor man with a morning newspaper and simple regular habits. But I was not a man who listened to gossip, rumour or threat, or the mild imaginings of hedge boys."