It was a hot day. He stopped once by the river to quench his thirst and consider the remains of Offa’s Dyke, which stood tall across the hillside before him, the evenly spaced trees along its ridge like sentries. Smearing his neck and legs with sun cream, he recalled the day that he and Gwion had rambled that section of the Dyke footpath with Beth-Ann and some of their friends from college. The memory darkened his mood, but he mounted his bike again, trying to put Gwion out of his mind. The steep pull up the mountain and the rough track across the moor were strenuous and crueller than he’d remembered, but he felt wonderfully alive from the physical effort and recognised his growing well-being. Gareth’s thoughts flowed freely, settling here and there like insects. He hummed melodies in time to the rhythm of his pedalling and marvelled at the stonechats that sang from gorse bush perches, launching themselves occasionally into sky dances, their white collars and red breasts lucid against the gilded upland. Still the track took him higher to where the grouse chattered their distinctive ‘go-back go-back’ in the heather and a pair of peregrines soared, stooped and swooped. He stopped to watch their acrobatics and the muscles of his thighs and calves, jolted from their perpetual motion, twitched eagerly. On the crest of the open moor the sun was fierce. He thought of the forest; its shade seemed elusive, there on top of the world, but soon the fast and breezy descent brought him steeply down into the pine-scented coolness.

World’s End gouged its course between Craig y Forwyn and Craig y Cythraul. Half way up the great limestone gorge, between the virgin and the devil, in amongst the relics of ancient mineshafts and limekilns, a spring bubbled up through the fallen boulders. Gareth knew it well from his childhood and splashing through the ford, where the stream from the spring crossed the track, he was thrilled to find it had not been parched by the hot, dry weather.