Below them, the village was wrapped in greenery, and the mist made smoke rings around the church steeple. The view was dizzyingly seductive: you felt that if you fell into it, it would just absorb you and by the time you reached the ground you’d have evaporated.

Lol shook his head. His day had already been tilted. Monday mornings, he needed to establish a work pattern for the week: sit at the desk by the window, write songs. His livelihood. What he did. What he was supposed to do. So why had he been almost grateful to see Jane crossing the street from the vicarage, wearing her skimpy orange top and her sense of purpose?

Jane said she had the day off school to work on a project connected with A-level art, a portfolio she was compiling on landscape mysteries. Something in connection with this that she needed to discuss, and Merrily had gone off early to meet some angsty priest, so, like, if Lol could spare just one hour…

All around Cole Hill the paths were overgrown; there were broken stiles and barbed-wire fences. It had taken most of an hour just to get here.

Jane shouldered her canvas bag.

‘Nobody comes up here now, and that’s wrong. We all need to go to the high places. It says that in the Bible, so even Mum-’

‘Had you been to this… particular high place before, Jane?’

She frowned. ‘I’m here now, that’s what matters. It’s where the ancient energy is drawn down, to feed the village spiritually, to feed its soul. You know?’

‘Alfred Watkins actually said that, did he? About feeding energy into Ledwardine?’

‘Not exactly, but he would have said it if he hadn’t been a magistrate and stuff, with civic duties and all that crap. You have to read between the lines, Lol.’

‘Right.’

Lol would have to agree that reading Alfred Watkins entirely altered your awareness of the humps and bumps of the countryside – the way Watkins’s own had been altered when he’d stood on top of a hill not far from here and noticed, in a flaring of wild revelation, how ancient sites, from prehistoric stones and mounds to medieval churches, seemed to have been arranged in straight lines. But Watkins had seen them as the earliest British trackways; most of the rest was New Age conjecture.