Temphill

The Severn Valley is the setting of several fictional towns and other locations created by horror writer Ramsey Campbell. It is part of the Cthulhu Mythos started by H. P. Lovecraft..

The River Severn is an actual river in Wales and western England. Campbell's stories mention various real-world locales, including the Cotswold Hills,Berkeley, and the A38 road. These references place "Campbell Country" in the southern part of Gloucestershire, roughly between the cities of Gloucester and Bristol. This area is more correctly referred to as the Vale of Berkeley or the Severn Estuary; the real-world Severn Valley refers to an area around fifty miles (80 km) further north.

Campbell invented his locales, when, as a 15-year-old Lovecraft fan, he submitted Lovecraftian pastiches, set in Lovecraft's New England, to Arkham House's August Derleth. "Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts," Campbell wrote in the introduction to his collection Cold Print, and he accordingly rewrote his stories with an English setting. His short story "The Tomb-Herd", for example, was originally set in Lovecraft's Kingsport, Massachusetts. It was transposed to the Cotswold town of Temphill when it appeared as "The Church in High Street", Campbell's first published story, in the 1962 Arkham House anthology Dark Mind, Dark Heart.

In that story, Campbell refers to hints "of actual worship of trans-spatial beings still practiced in such towns as Camside, Brichester, Severnford, Goatswood, and Temphill", indicating that he had already conceived of most of the principal locations of his Severn Valley setting. At the time, the teenaged Campbell had never been to the actual Severn Valley; the imaginary landscapes he described may relate more to the post-World War II Merseyside scenes he was familiar with. He recalled in an interview:

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