Article from the London Times:
Music and movie superstar George Wilder's massive country estate, Farraway Mist, was destroyed late last Friday night when some kind of landslide occurred along the Cornish coast where it's located.
The house was unoccupied at the time of the incident, which was precipitated by a seismic anomaly caused by erosion of the cliffs along the rocky coast where it's located, a few miles north of the village of Point Rosen in County Cornwall, in southwestern England. The cliffs, long known to be unstable, had been fortified and rebuilt over the years, most recently by Mr. Wilder himself a few years ago.
The crumbling of the cliffs caused the substructure of the house and the pipes underneath to rupture, which caused a fire beneath floor of the massive, centuries old building. Due to the remote location of the mansion, the fire went undiscovered for hours, by which time the house and numerous outbuildings were a total loss. Inside the house were many valuable antiques, including a mahogany Steinway, favored by both Mr. Wilder and his girlfriend of many years, Ms. Scout Lawson, and an extensive library, the archival of which brought Mr. Wilder and Ms. Lawson together in the first place.
Farraway Mist is considered a total loss, and has crumbled and burned to the ground, though the property itself, and the surrounding golf links are still very valuable, and could be sold for millions of pounds.
We recently caught up with the entire Wilder clan at the graduation ceremony of Sunil Patel and Alfred Johanson from Yale, and asked whether or not he'd be rebuilding on the site of the disaster, and what his future plans were.
"Well," he said, handing his new baby, Jess, to Ms. Lawson as he smiled, "I don't know. We still owned the place because we really love it there, you know? And we have good memories of Sunil and Alfred being there, too, as a matter of fact," he said, gesturing toward the two new beaming graduates.
Sunil and Alfred have come wandering over, carrying Alis and Ollie Wilder, but they declined to be interviewed for this article.
"We'll have to see what it would cost to rebuild, I suppose," George says, looking at Ms. Lawson, who nods, adjusting the baby's hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.
"Some really wonderful things happened there," he reiterates, "but some not so nice things happened as well, you know? Some things we'd just as soon forget." He nods pensively. "Yeah, we'll definitely have to think about it for sure."
He puts his arm around his girlfriend and beckons to Mr. Patel and Mr. Johanson and they all head toward the parking lot.
George Wilder is currently living in Connecticut with Ms. Lawson, his five year old daughter, Alis, his two year old son, Oliver, and his new baby, Jessamyn.
THE END
AN: As I wrote in the chapter entitled "Publishing Update" at the beginning of the book, Farraway Mist has been published on Amazon. If you enjoyed it, please consider going to Amazon and or Goodreads and rating the book, or even leaving a review. I'm putting the links for both in the comments section to the right of this paragraph (👉👉🏻👉🏼👉🏽👉🏾👉🏿) Goodreads is a totally free site, and you can rate or review tons of books; it's loads of fun, and helps me so much, so please consider it?
And I haven't forgotten George and Scout and Sunil and Alfred, I do want to do a sequel, just gimme some time...