“We can never go back again, that much is certain,”wrote Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, a novel that is nevertheless about returning (of the dead to the living and to the places where they still live), which has inspired legions of devoted readers to retrace Rebecca’s footsteps.

I am one of those fans and in the course of writing a book about du Maurier — and Menabilly, the mysterious Cornish mansion that inspired Manderley — I have been walking the same paths as she did, trying to follow the ghosts that haunt her landscape.

It is not easy to pin down du Maurier, the most secretive and reclusive of women, which is perhaps why she fell in love with Menabilly, a house on the south coast of Cornwall, hidden from the outside world and encircled by dense forest or, as she described it, “a jewel in the hollow of a hand”.

She first discovered Menabilly in the autumn of 1927, when it was abandoned and falling into ruin. She was 20, the second daughter of a handsome matinee idol, Sir Gerald du Maurier, and still living at home in Cannon Hall, a grand Hampstead house.

But du Maurier had already declared that her heart belonged to Cornwall, soon after her father bought Ferryside, a waterside house in Bodinnick, on the wooded side of the Fowey estuary .

Fowey has become more fashionable than it was 80 years ago — there are chic shops and boutique hotels overlooking the harbour — but it still has a fairytale air, its narrow streets curving beneath the towers of Place, the Gothic mansion owned by the Treffry family that stands on a hill surrounded by high stone walls.

This is the nearest town to Menabilly and du Maurier devotees arrive here for its annual literary festival, many of them hoping for a glimpse of the setting of Rebecca. The mansion, though, is as inaccessible as it was when the writer first set out to find it, as a trespasser who lost her way.

Menabilly remains closed to the public now, as it has always been — it is the home of the Rashleigh family, who have owned the estate for 800 years — but there is a footpath at the margins of the grounds, close to the overgrown drive that du Maurier describes in the opening of Rebecca (“a muddied path, leading nowhere, and the shrubs, green no longer but a shrouding black . . .”).

The overgrown rhododendrons and tangled brambles still beat back the most intrepid of intruders, as they did when du Maurier made her initial attempt to follow the twists of the drive. She found her way to Menabilly by the coastal path, clambering up from the beach that she was to make famous as the place where Rebecca drowned and rose again.

Du Maurier fell in love with the house with a passion that would last a lifetime; Menabilly appeared to be “the sleeping beauty of the fairytale, [waiting] until someone should come to wake her”.

If du Maurier saw herself as waking Menabilly then the house also awakened something within her. It provided the atmospheric setting for later novels — The King’s General and My Cousin Rachel — and when Hitchcock directed the film Rebecca, he observed that the story was of two women, one man, and a house, and that the house was the dominant presence.

It seems appropriate that du Maurier used the money that she made from Rebecca — a book that still attracts legions of new fans since its publication in 1938 — to lease Menabilly in August 1943. Although she could never make it her own (it was entailed to the Rashleighs, who reclaimed it in the Sixties), much of her fortune went on renovating it.

Thus Menabilly was the house that Rebecca rebuilt, and also the place to which Rebecca returned, when du Maurier felt herself to be haunted by the ghost of her famous fictional creation; an episode in her life that seems powerfully emblematic of her ability as a writer to blend fiction and fact into a landscape that readers can go back to, over and over again.

Daphne by Justine Picardie is published by Bloomsbury, £7.99. She will speak at the Port Eliot literary festival, Cornwall on July 25; www.porteliotfestival.com

Perfect setting for seduction

To explore the Cornish countryside setting of Daphne du Maurier’s romantic Frenchman’s Creek, choose a sunny summer’s day when the waters of the Helford Estuary flash like pirate gold and the roses and hydrangeas blaze on the whitewashed walls of Helford.

Sunken paths, roofed with beech branches, lead between banks thick with ferns and moss. In the fields around Kestle Farm are hedgebanks of brambles, purple vetches and the creamy froth of meadowsweet. Amid such rural richness the modern age seems far away — the perfect time-warp through which to drop to the secret banks of Frenchman’s Creek.

At high water, the creek is a ribbon under the trees; at low tide it curves seaward in a narrow channel through a bed of lime and chocolate mud. A drowsy humming tells of a host of wood wasps and flies busy under the sun-dappled trees. Frenchman’s Creek is the perfect setting for a romance.

Here du Maurier brought her dashing hero in his privateer La Mouette to steal the heart and the fidelity of Dona St Columb, the bored and rebellious wife of a Restoration buck too keen on the pleasures of London. Alas, no white sail of a saucy pirate schooner is to be seen in the creek today — only the blue hulls of ancient fishing boats at rest in the mud.

From the creek mouth you make inland across the hump of the headland, pausing at the crest to take in the view up the Helford River, over thickly wooded Groyne Point and across ridges of green pasture and red plough, white farms and grey church towers.

Then down to The Shipwright’s Arms at Helford, to sit and contemplate the sparkling waters of the estuary and dream of a white sail, a pirate skipper and sweet surrender on the banks of Frenchman’s Creek.

Pubs The Shipwright’s Arms in Helford (01326 231235), as much for its view of the Helford Estuary as for its pies and pints.

Route (OS Explorer 103) From Helford village car park, walk down a lane into Helford. Don’t cross bridge; continue with creek on right for 64m uphill on concrete path, then to shady path. In 440m, right (yellow arrow) across creek and Cornish stile; up path, over another Cornish stile and gate into field. Up right-hand edge of field. At top follow footpath signs round Kestle Farm to road (753254). Right for 45m; left (Cornish stile) on track descending to Frenchman’s Creek. Left (Permissive footpath) along creek.

Near creek mouth, detour inland; continue (Creekside path) beside creek until Permissive path points uphill and inland. Up steps; right up road (Private to left) to bench with viewpoint (751262). Right (Helford); at end of field, left (752261 — Helford) down track. Keep downhill at each fork, to Penarvon Cove (756263). Right (path sign) through woods to concrete track; left into Helford; right to car park.

County Cornwall.

Distance 4km (2½ miles).

Typical time 90 minutes.

Starting point Helford village car park (OS ref SW 759261).

What to see Helford village and estuary; Frenchman’s Creek; headland viewpoint from 751262.

What to read Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (Virago Modern Classics).
Christopher Somerville

The Times Walks have proved a huge hit and here are two more you can join:

Windsor Great Park, July 4. Derwent May leads the way.

Aldeburgh, July 18. Richard Morrison walks and talks about Benjamin Britten.

Go to: www.offersinthetimes.com/timeswalks