So Rockwell remained the barn and the few cottages, and the families, always, so it seemed, people of greater strength and better health than in the village. Their children wandered up into the steep forest behind the cottages and found other rocks, including a couple like tall pillars, one of which had a huge stone ball, four or five feet across, balanced on top of it. All said the Devil must have put it there, for how else could such a huge stone be raised that high? So the Rockwell mothers advised their children to keep away from a place where the Devil obviously kept his playthings.

As the years went by the ploughs in the Great Field went a little further every season up the slope towards Rockwell, and the hawthorns and wild roses vanished, and the pasture and cornfields increased to each side of the sharp rocky point. Now the ploughed land almost reached the foot of the steep slope where the water still trickled down into the stone trough.

Marion looked at the village, her familiar village, before her. The Hall, that great dark building with the licheny shutters thrown open from the high windows, the bleached thatch roof, the row of sheds just visible beyond – it was all too ordinary a sight to take her eye. But to the right stood the huge spreading oak on the Green with its tiny bronze leaves now greening – that was a pleasure to look at. And the flock of grey geese nosing in the grass before her with gawky fluffy goslings waddling about gave her a feeling of anticipation of richness to come.

Beyond the Hall and church the Hall field sloped gently up, divided into its accustomed strips, thin lines of lush grass with the ploughed earth in between them, now scummed over with newly growing wheat. To the right, beyond the Green and the semicircle of cottages lay the slope of Mill field, now fallow, to be cut for hay later. The grass was deep with buttercups and tall daisies, lady’s-smocks and plantains, campions and borage. Marion knew that if she knelt down and parted the grasses with her hands she would see little speedwells and stitchworts and potentillas. Away to the right and half hidden by rising ground and twists in the stream, by hedges of hawthorns thickened by strips of white blossom along every twig and elder bushes dark green with pools of white lace, was just visible the Mill’s roof – the place where she was born and where her brother, Simon, and his family lived. Beyond the Mill and beyond the marshy area which part-drained into the millpond, was the wilder land of poor earth, stones and thin grass, of heather, gorse, wild roses and brambles, with every now and then a windblown beech, thickly branched, and a bent hawthorn. Here and there in little dells of soft richer grass were the little turf shelters where the shepherds lived, sharing these low hovels with sheep and newborn lambs.