The stories always started with the Great Storm. That storm had occurred since the arrival of Golden-haired Osyth, so its myth had not the same depth and potency as Osyth’s story. Besides, a storm, great and damaging as it might be, was still just a storm, whereas the story of Osyth with all its strange background had a rare romance that a tale of wind could never evoke. Still, it was a storm, the violence of which had never been seen since. The greatest effect of the storm was not in the village but elsewhere, up in the forests and in the fields. Now, if you walked through the village keeping the Hall and then the church and graveyard on your left, and kept on till you passed the Great Barn (itself part built from an oak uprooted on the Green) and left the haystacks and the open sheds on your right, you came out into the open land with Hall fields left and Mill fields right. All the way the land sloped gently up hill, and the path went on and on up through Great Field. In those days the Great Field was not so great, only part of it was ploughed and as it got steeper it was a rougher pasture with hawthorns and broom and wild roses among the grass, and the ploughs never reached there. Then suddenly a point of very steep land came down into this rough pasture and this point was covered in big forest trees, oaks and ashes and beeches, and no one bothered about it for it was far too steep ever to be brought under a plough or to provide pasture. But soon after the Great Storm one of Osyth’s tall young sons was walking up there and found that one of the huge oaks growing on this steep point had been blown over and lay across the slope among the hawthorns and hazels, but – and this was the unusual sight – when the boy examined the huge vertical disc of roots at the end of the fallen trunk, he found that they had exposed a wall of smooth rock, higher than his head, wider than it was high. From all the cracks in this rock wall, from which some torn tree roots still projected, a clear water bubbled out and soaked into the moist ferny ground under the fallen trunk. After such a storm and the days and nights of deluging rain, there is water everywhere, but when a month or so later, and a dry month at that, the sweet clear water still ran from the cracks in the rock, the boy got his brothers along to show them. They all realized what it meant: where water flowed, men and animals could live.