Charlie Higson revisits Sardinia`s rugged interior, the setting for Bloodfever

Charlie Higson revisits Sardinia's rugged interior for The Telegraph, the setting for his second Young Bond adventure.

People always ask writers where they get their ideas from, as if we know. I think a lot of people would be appalled at the random way in which a novel can come together from stray bits and pieces. But I can remember the exact moment when I had the idea for Blood Fever. I was on holiday in Sardinia and flicking through a guidebook, to find out just what I was missing, when I saw a picture of a cave. Not just any cave. It was called Tiscali, and had been discovered only 100 years ago by some woodcutters. It was hidden 500 metres up in the Supramonte mountains and had a high, domed ceiling with a circular hole in the middle. Huge steps led down from an opening in one wall, and most amazingly of all, an entire neolithic village had been built inside it.

It looked exactly like a Bond villain's lair, particularly Ken Adams's extraordinary volcano set from You Only Live Twice. I had nearly finished writing Silverfin, the first of my books about Young Bond, and was looking for ideas for the second. Well, I had found my idea. I knew that I had to set part of my next Young Bond book inside this cave.

Bond is known for travelling to exotic foreign locations, and I already knew that I wanted to take him out of Britain for his second adventure. I decided that Sardinia would be an ideal location. Of all the major Mediterranean islands, it's probably the least well known, despite being the second largest, after Sicily. Until fairly recently it was not a welcome destination - poverty-stricken, riddled with malaria and infested with bandits (though perfect for an adventure story) - but the swamps where the mosquitoes bred were drained, the bandits tamed and when the Aga Khan built the luxury resort of Costa Smerelda in the 50s he put the island firmly on the tourist map. Most people's knowledge of the island, however, will be restricted to the coast; the real Sardinia is inland. Centuries of invasion and piracy meant that the Sardinians retreated to the hills and left the coast largely undeveloped, so that most of the coastal resorts are recent additions.

I'd been guilty of merely scratching the surface myself on previous trips, when we'd stayed exclusively in the confines of the luxurious Forte Village hotel, so I'd seen virtually nothing of the island. On our next trip, however, we hired a villa in the rocky north of the island, at a place called Capo D'Orso, the Cape of the Bear, so named because of a giant wind-carved rock that stands high up on a promontory, looking out to sea, in the shape of a great crouching bear.

This became my second location in the book. I planted a surrealist villa in the shape of an octopus over our existing villa and kept the surroundings. I wanted Bond to stay with an eccentric relative who lived a bohemian Mediterranean lifestyle. I've always been intrigued by the type of rich, decadent European expat types who set up camp in places like Tangiers and Capri, the sort of people who might have Noel Coward as a house guest. The location of our villa was perfect, despite being near to the rather grim town of Palau, which is the main ferry port for the north of the island. I was pleased to find out that it was no better in the 30s and one or two travel books evocatively described it as a thoroughly God-forsaken place.

Having written the book in draft, I decided that I ought to go back and actually visit the cave, in which I'd set a gun battle as a homage to You Only Live Twice. All I'd had to go on was the original picture in the guidebook, and it had been an artist's impression of how the cave might have looked in Roman times, when it was still inhabited. So I booked a beautiful hotel in the hills, the Su Gologone, which has amazing views up the valley below Nuoro, the heart of old Sardinia.

I had gone with a friend and we studied the maps and set out early one morning for the climb up to the cave. We had been told that there were red arrows painted on the rocks to show you the way, but it took an hour or so of driving around deserted mountain roads before we could even find where we were supposed to start. The arrows were not very consistent, half of the track having been washed away by recent flooding, and we took a wrong turn somewhere near the top and found ourselves scaling a sheer cliff of vicious jagged rocks, but at last, some hours after setting off, we arrived, only to find that the cave looked absolutely nothing like the picture in the guide book. The artist who had done the impression had used his imagination somewhat. Despite our disappointment, it's still well worth the trip. The views from the top of the mountain are spectacular and there is a definite air of mystery about the cave, just don't expect to bump into Blofeld there.

You can still see the remains of the village inside. It was built by the Nuraghic people, the original inhabitants of the island, about whom very little is known. Their monuments litter Sardinia; in fact there are about 7,000 of them. It would be easy to ignore these monuments, which are mostly in the form of tumbling down circular towers, as they don't initially look that impressive, but it's worth visiting one of the larger ones, which are like small castles. In the book, Bond visits the Nuraghe Santu Antine on an ill-advised school archaeological trip and nearly falls to his death from the top of the main tower.

Santu Antine is one of the best preserved of these Nuraghic "castles" (others worth visiting are Losa Nuraghe at Abbasanta and the Su Nuraxi at Barumini). It was built 3,000-4,000 years ago and consists of four interlinked towers surrounded by a wall. It sits at one end of a long volcanic valley that has so many ruins it is known as the Valle dei Nuraghes. Its massive stone walls, built without mortar, are pretty impressive, and surprisingly intact. If you go into the maze-like interior, you get a strong sense of a truly ancient civilisation. So if you can drag yourself off the beaches, you should really try to visit this Sardinian equivalent of Stonehenge or the pyramids of Egypt.

Charlie Higson's Blood Fever is published by Puffin at £6.99.

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