Temphill

Temphill is a fictional English town, created by Ramsey Campbell in his first published story, "The Church in High Street", which introduced the Severn Valley setting in which Temphill is located. In the introduction to The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, Campbell describes it as 
In "The Church in High Street", Temphill is called a "decaying Cotswold town" and "a place of ill repute." The story's narrator notes that
The region around Temphill is dominated by "grim, brooding plains, sparsely habited, where the only vegetation was a grey, diseased grass and an infrequent bloated oak." There is also a thickly forested marsh, however, and a "densely wooded hillside" that bears "the aspect of a primeval forest."
== The Church ==
The "shunned church"--a temple on a hill--inspired the name of the town, which grew up around it; in his introduction, Campbell notes that it is "reported to be other-dimensional". The church is said to exist "conterminously" with a temple of Yog-Sothoth:
It's said that "the majority of the people of Temphill still visit the church on the right nights." Those who penetrate the catacombs beneath the church, reached via a trap door beneath the first set of pews, find themselves unaccountably unable to leave the town, as if the streets were turning back on themselves. This is an effect of the Tomb Herd, extra-dimensional predators who dwell in the crypt.
Other than the church, the main attraction of Temphill seems to be Poole's General Store, on the ground floor of a three-storey building with a collapsed roof.
== Characters ==
In "The Church on High Street", Temphill is home to John Clothier, "a man possessed of an extraordinary amount of ancient knowledge," and formerly Albert Young, a young man working on a "book on witchcraft and witchcraft lore." In the subsequent story "The Horror From the Bridge," Temphill is where James Phipps acquires "extremely rare chemicals," as well as his mysterious wife.
"The Franklyn Paragraphs" lists Temphill as one of the places visted by "the circle of young men" around cult leader Roland Franklyn. Franklyn's widow, complaining about the horrors he had put her through, says: "He took me down to Temphill, and made me watch those things dancing on the graves."
Category:Structures
Category:Locations Originating From Expanded Mythos Works