The Mannequin Makers Location Guide: Part Three: Crossman's Gully

What the guidebooks say

Name: Crossman's Gully

Nature: Fictional

Location: A day's ride (by horse) from Marumaru (also fictional, see part one).

Importance in The Mannequin Makers: features in Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. Without giving away the plot, let's just say the climax happens here.

Inspired by: Earthquakes (the town), Clay Cliffs, Knottingly Park Bush Hut

What the novel says

"I made my way slowly to the door and eased it open. The hinges gave a creak but the man did not wake. Outside, I surveyed our destination for the first time. To my left a curving wall of rock rose up to a height of thirty feet. The rock was yellow with black tarnished edges and greenish-black vertical stripes. A collection of square-sided boulders lay at the foot of this cliff, their surface brownish-grey with pocks of the same sandy yellow. Dry, thorny bushes and larger trees with waxy green leaves sprang up from gaps between the boulders but I stood on a sort of plain with knee-high grass that swirled in the breeze like some diaphanous material. The grass was bound by another curving wall of rock perhaps forty yards away. It was as if I stood between two cupped stone hands." (p.109)

Skirting around the spoilers

The locations in Part One and Two weren't too difficult to talk about without spoilers. I guess saying there's a shipwreck in the subantarctic is a bit of a spoiler, since it happens halfway through the book, but it's pretty clearly signalled on the back of the book.

Crossman's Gully is a bit different.

Let's just say it's a place certain characters retreat to in various times in the novel when town gets a bit too much. 

The notable features of this gully are it's geography and the hut from which Avis has just emerged in the passage above.

A world of pure imagination

When I first ventured into Crossman's Gully in the first draft of Part Two of the novel, I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't even know it would have a name.

So the first draft was a bit vague. There was a hut in a gully.

Good stuff.

I knew that I'd need to flesh it out more in future drafts, and when I returned to the gully in subsequent parts of the novel.

With this in mind, I went on my road trip in late January 2012 (third time in three posts it's been mentioned... must've been important).

Clay Cliffs and Earthquakes

I blogged about my visits to Clay Cliffs and Earthquakes here. Basically, I was drawn to these places by their names. I didn't know what I'd find exactly, and certainly wasn't thinking: this can be my gully.

But when I arrived at both I thought: this can be my gully.

First up was Clay Cliffs, near Omaramara. The geology of the place was pretty interesting, but I was more struck by the view looking back through the formations to the braided river, the brown plain and the foothills.

And a bit further around, you glimpse the snow-dusted Southern Alps.

The scene I'd already written in my gully occurred in early January. I was there late January, so it was pretty similar. I began rewriting my scene in my head.

I thought I'd cracked it. I thought Clay Cliffs was enough.

Then I went to Earthquakes. And I was like, "This is my gully."

And then, when I went to Waimate, I had the final piece of the puzzle: Knottlingly Park Bush Hut, the design of which I shamelessly appropriated for the hut in my gully where events happen.

In the end, Crossman's Gully is all of these places and none of them.