‘Not these days,’ said Matt sourly, when he was reminded of it. ‘More like influenced by the price of milk and the latest EU regulations.’

An old milk churn stood near the doorway under an ancient stone lintel, and log fires burned in both bars. In the summer they often preferred to sit outside at one of the picnic tables in the garden, admiring the hills or watching the gliders pass overhead. But Matt wasn’t in a mood to notice the scenery, even if it had been daylight.

‘Some of the people who live in these villages now are on a different planet from what we are. If you meet people down at the postbox or in the pub, they don’t relate to what you’re doing at all. Their work and life experiences are so different from ours. They think we’re either mad or quaint.’

That night, the pub was filled with people in various stages of saturation and evaporation. It was like a Turkish bath where everyone had forgotten to take their clothes off. You couldn’t get near the fire for piles of drenched cagoules and plastic over-trousers.

‘It’s sheer ignorance. They think we’re all either grain barons or peasants.’

The smell of cooked food mingled with the steam from drying clothes, like the aroma from the kitchens of some exotic restaurant. If he closed his eyes, Cooper could imagine a genuine curry being prepared in the background, hot with cayenne and spiced with interesting herbs.

‘You know Geoff Weeks at One Ash? He has Right to Roam over part of his farm. Some ramblers complained about finding a dead sheep on his land the other day. They rang the police, even – can you believe it?’

Ben wanted to say that, yes, he could believe it. You only had to spend half an hour in the Call Reception Centre to get an idea of the complaints from the public that call handlers had to deal with. Three thousand of them a day. Litter on the pavement, birds stuck up trees. A dead sheep was nothing. Sometimes the actual nature of the incident wasn’t clear until response officers arrived at the scene.

But he said nothing, preferring not to interrupt Matt when he was getting things off his chest.

‘If you’ve got five hundred ewes,’ said Matt, ‘and you run them until they’re seven or eight crop, the way Geoff does, then a certain percentage of them are going to die. It’s a fact of life, isn’t it?’

Ben nodded. Yes, death was certainly a fact of life in the countryside. It was one of the things that urban dwellers didn’t appreciate. These days, they ran special coach trips from the cities to give townies a chance to smell the difference between a cow and sheep. But you didn’t know about the omnipresence of death until you lived here.