Of course, back at the Hall, Will the Tall, by then an old man, had been wondering what to do with all his sons. Hubert, the eldest, would stay and manage the Manor, as he already was mostly doing, but the other four, all big strong young men, went up the fields and started to work. They spent a year cutting up the fallen tree and clearing the ground and all the time watching the running water. It never failed them. It ran quicker after heavy rain, but even in a July drought it still ran sweet. So they built a barn, using the main trunk of the fallen oak for its roof ridge, and some cottages for themselves, and one of their sisters joined them, and they mostly married and settled there. The new cottages were built just above the rock face and under other huge oak trees. One of the boys took an iron spike and a mallet and dug out a stone trough at the foot of the rock face to catch the trickles. It was made at an easy height for the animals to drink from and had a wide smooth ledge at one side so that the women could stand their buckets there when they went down for water. They all said it was much easier than having a well or a stream that you had to drag the water up from. Their water was always clean and fresh, running cool into their buckets. No one knew who first called it Rockwell, but the name stuck and the farm there was always known as Rockwell.

It was a special place, of prestige and riches. How and when its legal status arose no one knew or bothered about, but by Marion’s time it was an established tradition that the men born at Rockwell were free men – were they not descendants of the Lords of the Manor? – who owed no labour to the Hall. All they owed were a dozen fat hogs every winter, and that was no problem to the Rockwell men as the remaining oaks, wide-spreading mature trees, rained down bushels of ripe acorns into the pigsties every September. Everyone in the village recognized Rockwell bacon as specially rich and tender. The other service Rockwell rendered to the village – and this in Marion’s eyes was of such long-standing as to be unquestioned – was that Rockwell always kept a bull, a stallion, a billy goat or two and a few boars (rams were the charge of the Hall’s shepherd) so that the Hall farm and the villagers could eat or castrate their male animals at will, knowing that up at Rockwell their female animals could be served for the price of a basket or two of eggs or a tub of butter.

Yes, Rockwell was a special place, far away enough from the Hall to feel a certain freedom and independence, near enough for all the support of the village craftsmen. Life was thought to be easier at Rockwell, and most of the village girls hoped that they would marry a Rockwell boy. Not many could, of course, and several times had the oldest Rockwell man sent his sons off to establish themselves in the village. As was frequently said, ‘There’s enough water in Rockwell’s trough for so many people and animals and if you drink it dry in winter you’d wait two or three days till it’s full again, but you drink it dry in summer you may wait two or three weeks before it’s full again, and are the women and animals to walk a mile there and a mile back to the stream for every mouthful of water?’