In order to force myself to work out a village layout for a story setting, I've been collecting drawings and photographs of medieval villages. One of the most useful is an archeological site at Gainsthorpe in Yorkshire. A different archeological discovery is a Labyrinthine structure found on hilltop in Crete. That History Blog post sent me to an earlier period, but the same sort of stimulation toward inventing place.
Hieronymus Cock's etching depicts the mythological Cretan labyrinth as a very elaborate example of the sort of construction that might have been built in a Renaissance prince's garden. Its northern European landscape could be used to help picture 16th buildings or to invent a huge, mysterious Renaissance garden on an island. The real, newly discovered Minoan structure of concentric circles calls for an even more vivid imagination to supply a culture from which it could have emerged.
Which comes first—the story or the invented landscape? Answer: It all depends!