Local landscape and history provide a vivid and at times eerie backdrop to Eliza Graham’s third novel, Jubilee. The Vale of White Horse and its famous landmarks such as White Horse Hill and Wayland Smithy are integral to this tale about the mysterious disappearance of a ten-year-old girl.

Although most of the action is set in the fictional village of Craven, Graham admits there is more than a passing resemblance to Woolstone, Uffington and Childrey.

The Vale is truly inspirational for a writer, according to the author, who shares a cottage in Kingston Lisle with her husband and two children.

“I open the front door and the Downs are right in front of me, so these places are part of my everyday life. We have taken the children to White Horse Hill and the Downs from when they were very small and I walk in the area with my dog a lot.

“It does you so much good up there. It is fantastic. If I am getting stuck and don’t know what I am going to write next, a brisk walk always tends to get me going again.

“On the other hand, there are some February days when the sun never gets through the cloud or the fog, so it can work both ways,” she said.

Jubilee centres on the story of how a child called Jessamy Winter vanishes from a party held to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. It takes another 25 years before the disturbing facts behind her disappearance are unravelled by her cousin Rachel, bringing to light some terrible family secrets.

Graham, who read English at Lincoln College, Oxford, works as a freelance copy editor when not writing novels. Her first book, Playing With The Moon, was shortlisted as a World Book Day book two years ago and was followed by Restitution, which also focuses on secrets and the legacy of war.

Much of the local history research for Jubilee was done at the Tom Brown’s School Museum in Uffington and the Vale and Downland Museum in Wantage.

“Also, it is amazing what you can find by Googling,” she said. “For instance, it was quite hard to imagine what Wayland Smithy would have looked like before it was taken over by the National Trust, but I found a pre-restoration Victorian watercolour of it on the Internet, which was very useful.”

She stumbled upon the Vale by chance 15 years ago when she was living and working in London and her then-fiancé, now husband Johnnie, was based in Bristol.

“We knew very little about this area — we literally got out a map and picked it because it looked halfway between us. We crossed our fingers and hoped it would be nice and were fantastically lucky because it is. We live in a small cottage and it is idyllic.”

In Jubilee, there are several references to ‘incomers’ and hostility towards them from some villagers, so was this autobiographical in any way?

“When we had been here a few years, I overheard an old chap in the village referring to someone as being ‘new’ and they had been there for 20 years,” she said.

“For the first year we were here, before we had the children, we were just commuting to work every day so weren’t really here much, except at weekends. But we had our children shortly afterwards, which meant we became involved with the primary school, Brownies and helping build a village playground and that made a difference — we really got to know people in the village.”

The mystery surrounding Jessamy’s sudden disappearance unfolds through flashbacks, some set during the Second World War, when the White Horse was covered as a precaution. “That nearly tripped me up. I only found that out fairly far into writing the book. The White Horse would have been a good landmark for enemy pilots — they would have been able to see exactly where they were in relation to Swindon and the railway lines.”

She is at pains to emphasise that many of the places and people in Jubilee exist only in her imagination. “I had to muck around a bit with the topography for the sake of what you might call dramatic demands.

“I am sure that when some of my local friends in Uffington are reading it they will be shaking their heads and saying ‘There’s no farm on that part of the hill’.”

l Jubilee is published by Pan Macmillan at £7.99.