The Orkney plane is tiny. Rain laces the windowpanes. She stows her bag beneath the seat. People greet each other as old friends. Just as the door is about to close, one of the men from the bar climbs aboard, breathing quickly, as though he has been running. He says hello to an older lady on the other side of the aisle from Hannah, before taking his seat a couple of rows in front. His hair is short and neat. He moves with the exaggerated precision of someone who knows it is still morning, and that he is drunk. The first glimpse of the islands is through a break in the cloud—choppy sea and then the low-lying gray-brown of the land. As the plane banks, she sees rain and almost-empty roads.

It is not yet midday—too early to check into the hotel—and so she picks up her rental car and decides to drive up the island. The sky has lifted a little. She knows the main concentration of sites is forty minutes or so away; burial chambers, standing stones. She might as well see them while the rain holds off.

She passes through the town: a large red-bricked cathedral, stone-fronted houses, a huge supermarket on the route out to the north. The landscape is saturated, unpromising. The radio in the car is tuned to Radio 2—some inane chatter, some cheesy songs. She tries for something else but gets only static, and so turns it off. This was not what she expected, when she booked this holiday, in the quiet of her flat. She expected something craggy, magnificent, some sort of scale to dwarf her interior landscape, but there is barely a hill or a tree to be seen, only tussocky grass and pebble-dashed bungalows. It is, if she is honest, all quite bleak.

She parks at a set of three huge standing stones and climbs out of the car. A large sheep with a broad face stands in the middle of them, cropping the grass. The sheep is remarkably ugly. So are the stones. They look like a piece of Brutalist civic architecture—something an overeager county council might have thought was a good idea sometime in the 1970s. She walks around them dutifully. She stands in the middle. The sheep eyes her suspiciously. She waits to feel something but feels nothing other than mildly self-conscious.