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One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical fiction is visiting the places where my characters lived. Following in their footsteps and seeing the landscapes they knew helps me bring their stories to life.

But sometimes it’s not possible to do that. Places change over time and become unrecognizable from how they would have been a few hundred years ago. And sometimes it’s just not possible to conduct research in person. That’s when I rely on historic maps and pictures, contemporary descriptions, and now, with ever more satisfying results, the Internet.

In October 2009 as I began working on The September Queen, I embarked on a research trip to England. It was thrilling to visit Boscobel House and Moseley Hall and to see the actual priest holes into which Charles II curled his six-foot-two-inch frame when hiding from Cromwell’s cavalry patrols, and to retrace the route that Jane Lane took in her travels with the young king.

But very little is known about what happened to Jane after she parted from Charles. I read that, hoping to reunite with Charles in France, she walked with her brother to Yarmouth, a small town on the south coast near the Isle of Wight. That would have taken her through much of the same country where she journeyed with Charles. It was only when I got home to California that I learned to my dismay that she probably sailed from another Yarmouth – on the east coast of England, so in a completely different direction and through vastly different terrain.

I would have to reconstruct Jane’s journey from afar. A 1939 facsimile of John Ogilby’s 1686 Britannia, a book of road maps of England, gave me an idea of much of the route from Staffordshire to Yarmouth, and even depicted the roads and the country surrounding them in great detail, featuring hills, villages, bridges, and even large houses and windmills.

But the book didn’t have maps for some of the way Jane must have traveled. So I used Google Maps to get directions from one major town to the next, and then used it and Google Earth to zoom in close enough to discover the names of the roads, which are frequently still called simply by where they lead. Finding a road labeled Norwich Road let me know that was likely the path Jane would have followed to reach Norwich. Then I could soar along above the road to see what the landscape was like, and even now much of the countryside hasn’t changed substantially from what it had been like in 1651.

I was able to use up-to-the-minute technology in another way, too. When I thought I was near the site of Jane’s home Bentley Hall but wasn’t sure, I used my iPhone to Google “Bentley Hall Staffordshire.” Up popped Michael Shaw and Danny McAree’s article “The Rediscovery of Bentley Hall, Walsall,” which confirmed that I was standing near where Jane had lived. I gazed at the horizon that would have been familiar to her and felt the cool October breeze she would have known in that spot. Not as much fun as traveling for research, but as Jane might have said, “Needs must when the devil drives!”

What time and place would you like to visit? How close can you get using old maps and pictures and new technology?

Visit Gillian Bagwell website, www.gillianbagwell.com, to read more about her books and read her blog Jane Lane and the Royal Miracle www.theroyalmiracle.blogspot.com, which recounts her research adventures and the daily episodes in Charles’s odyssey.

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