The field is filling up with picnickers. The maypole music has begun again, slower and more mournful – an Elizabethan dirge or a tale of lost love. The dancers step slowly and deliberately, circling one another with measured paces, turning away from each other, clapping their free hands together and swapping ribbons between them, perfectly in time.

‘Do you think they make a living out of it?’ she says. ‘Family business?’

‘It’s a little seasonal, isn’t it,’ says Pete.

Mel stands. Free of her 14-hole DMs, her feet breathe in the soft grass. She runs a hand along the hedgerow and disturbs a small bird. The neighbouring meadow is alive with butterflies.

Further along she finds a gap in the hedge and slips through to the other side. A man with binoculars nods at her and carries on. The earth is dry and hard on her feet and the flowers almost waist-height already. The music and chatter behind her get quieter as she walks, and she can hear insects in the grasses. Towards the wood a cloud of midges and dragonflies hovers over a faint smell of damp. There are people in the wood too – she can hear activity now that it’s not drowned out by the noise of the field, and occasionally see a movement in the trees.

The sky is a cloudless cyan. In the background the hills roll above a green cornfield, and if she crouches down, the human sounds are muffled by the thick vegetation and by the buzzing and the thrumming near her ears.

When Pete comes to find her, she is lying in the long grass, clasping a bunch of oxeye daisies to her chest.

‘For a crown,’ she says.

They sit in the meadow for a while, looking at the hills.

On their way back to the field they stop at the hedge and pick buds of elder and crab apple.

The campfire at the pit is glowing brightly when they emerge. Patti is there, on an upturned bucket, fashioning some pliant branches into a hoop.

A man in a denim shirt and an unadorned wicker crown is drumming quietly. He acknowledges them as they sit down, then closes his eyes and continues to play.

A plump cross-legged woman chucks them over lengths of willow, dogwood and ivy from a pile on a piece of sacking in front of her. Around the circle people weave crowns and whittle bits of wood. A red-headed teenager sits still as a woman braids sections of her hair into tiny plaits, folding in cow parsley and sprays of forget-me-nots and ears of unripe barley, roping them into a crown.

Melanie takes a stem of catkinned willow and works it into a round, sizing it on her head and binding it with ivy and grasses and the bloom she picked from the roadside this morning.