“And this,” said my guide, “is where the serious business of the Éleuthèrian Mills starts.” The blockhouses in which DuPont gunpowder was fashioned were curiously constructed. They possessed no smokestacks or windows and were connected by a narrow-gauge train track (wooden, my guide told me, to avoid sparks!) upon which the quarry tubs full of charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur were moved from one mill to the next. And within their grim walls a mixture of those three elements was pressed and grained and glazed and corned into high-quality DuPont gunpowder. Sometimes the most relaxing place to travel is nowhere at all.” — from One Must Tell the Bees

The escape route followed by John Wilkes Booth after assassinating President Lincoln is easy to follow, running more or less along Route 301, but it does not offer much in the way of interesting sights to see. Much of the Maryland portion of the journey is now part of the sprawling suburbs of Washington D.C., and none of the Virginia sites are on public land.

There are two East Deans to be found in the U.K., both in the South Downs. One lies in West Sussex, near Chichester, the other 50 miles away in East Sussex, a mile from the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters and 5 miles from Eastbourne—and it is this East Dean that features in One Must Tell the Bees.

“Holmes’s cottage was a timber-framed farmhouse dressed in local stone and set in the southeastern face of Went Hill, a gentle slope of green and gold fields that descends for a mile from his backyard and comes to an abrupt end at the Seven Sisters, the great chalk cliffs that stretch from Seaford Head to Eastbourne” — from One Must Tell the Bees