On a wild and blustery morning in Cumbria a line of cars moves along a narrow lane curving steeply up through woods coloured with campion, bluebells and wild garlic. In the distance, only the Coniston fells are higher than this. We have come to an isolated farm to record a scene for a BBC radio play: the farmer and his dog obligingly supply a couple of ewes and their lambs as extras, the sound crew position themselves, the actors hunch over their scripts as the producer raises her hand to start and the wind whips through the yard.

Also in the yard are the writers, in Gore-Tex and gumboots. There are ten of them altogether, outnumbering the actors by almost three to one, though some have stayed down in the valley to prepare lunch. Food played a central role in the group over the two years it took them to produce their play, meeting in village halls to work on scenes, discuss characters, edit and re-edit while a casserole bubbled on the kitchen stove.

None of them had written a play or had anything published before, though several wrote poetry or short stories in private. “Even thinking of submitting something to a magazine made me blush,” said one; “I was a closet writer,” said another, “joining the group was like coming out.”

In 2003 each of them had answered an advert for rural women interested in joining a writing group. Among them were teachers, a PR consultant, an academic and the manager of an outward bound centre; one, the wife of a local GP, describes herself as the “token housewife”. Since successfully selling their play to the BBC, almost all the women have reduced their working hours to devote more time to writing. One of them, Katherine Pirnie, has given up work completely, closing her thriving PR company. “The business had made quite a bit of money,” she says, “so I have a cushion.” In the past year Pirnie has sold several short stories, won a small literary prize and is close to finishing her first novel.

The group was led by Zosia Wand, daughter of Polish immigrants and an established playwright; she had been given a bursary by the BBC to set up a writers’ group in her local area of Cumbria under a project called Writing From the Margins. At first, she says, they produced stories, building characters and creating a fictional rural community: “We ended up with a cast of thousands.” The bursary came to an end after six months but the group voted to keep Wand on, paying her out of their own pockets. “We were having too much fun to stop,” says one. When Wand noticed that the BBC had allocated several afternoon slots to community drama, she encouraged the group to have a go at a play.

“I’d worked on another collaborative project which had been a disaster,” Wand says. “This time I made sure that no writer became attached to her own ideas: as soon as someone brought a new scene or a character to the group, it would be given to someone else to develop. They were encouraged to comment and edit, criticise constructively and to cut a line or a scene, however well crafted, if necessary. They learnt not to be precious.”

The result is Heft Like the Herdwick, a cleverly plotted drama with an unexpectedly moving denouement and a meditation on themes of belonging, home and the power of place. In Cumbria, the local Herdwick sheep are “hefted” — born with a genetic map, knowing unerringly the shape and extent of their hillside pasture — and the play examines how humans, too, can feel hefted to their native landscape.

Central to the narrative is a homecoming, in this case that of a young woman, Katy, returning to her native valley from New York to be with her father, Thomas. A corpse has been found in the lake and Thomas is under suspicion: could the body be that of Katy’s mother who died when she was little? Katy’s reappearance in the valley causes waves, not least between her former boyfriend and the girl he is about to marry.

That scene was originally written by Jean Wilkinson who herself went to work in America before returning to her farming parents, an experience shared by other prodigal daughters. “Cumbria is somewhere you get out of to get an education, a job, build a life,” explains 31-year-old Beth Broomby, now settled back in the valley and pregnant with her first baby. “You have to justify coming back to your friends, who see it as a backward step. The fact is, I love it here.”

Wand says the group is now working on a new drama series and she thinks that at least four of the members will have individual plays commissioned within the year. “They’ve far exceeded expectations,” she says. “My biggest problem with them all along was their lack of confidence. As an immigrant I’ve always been told you can do anything you want to, but these women were so diffident about writing — all that ability lying dormant.”

We are on a jetty on the edge of Coniston Water, rain streaming off our umbrellas, while out on a boat they are recording the scene in which the body is found. Shaking water from her cagoule, 58-year-old Rosey Darbishire confides: “I’d wanted to be an authoress since the age of 8; I wrote and wrote but always for my eyes only. Now there’s the play and I’ve had a short story accepted for publication. I’ve learned that I can do more than I thought.”

Heft Like the Herdwick is the Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4 at 2.15pm on Thursday