Our home lies in a loop of the river Forth a number of miles upstream from the town of Stirling.  The river - rising from a confluence just above Aberfoyle - meanders like a brown rope the Creator has dropped haphazardly across the ancient green flood-plain which forms the eastern flank of Scotland's pinched waist.  The river curves, swerves, doubles back and bows round again in a series of convoluted wriggles between the Gargunnock escarpment to the south and the long, shallow slope of collectively untitled hills to the north (my favourite of which, for its name alone, is Slymaback); it passes through Stirling itself, swelling gradually, and continues to snake its way to Alloa, where it broadens out further and begins to seem more like part of the sea rather than a feature of the land.

Where it passes us, the river is deep, not yet tidal, smoothly flowing unless in spate, often soupy with silt and still narrow enough for a child to throw a stone all the way across, from one muddy, reeded bank to the other.

The pouch of raised land where we live is called High Easter Offerance.  The Victorian mansion, the older farmhouse, its outbuildings and associated barns, sheds and glasshouses as well as the various abandoned vehicles that have been pressed into service as additional accommodation, storage or greenhouses, together take up perhaps half of the fifty or so acres the river's loop encompasses, with the rest given over to a small walled apple orchard, two goat-cropped lawns, a stand of Scots pine and another of birch, larch and maple, and - where the old estate slopes down to the river - a near-encircling wilderness of weeds, bushes, muddy hollows, giant hog weeds and rushes.