De Flunkl sweats under his cloth tunic and daubs himself with a dock leaf, cupping the sweat in the fold of the leaf, and then licks it away to maintain the equilibrium of his internal humours. On the right, above them on the other side of the valley, the quadrants of fields have broken down into one another. Heifers, heavy sows and ewes, their lambs at their teat, laze along the way. The fields above them are untilled and unmanned in a quiet confusion. Pleasantly low-key chaos, idyllic almost, is everywhere.

All these animals, but especially the sheep, whose wool is particularly receptive to nature’s adhesives, like the entrapping filaments of spiders’ webs, are lightly dusted with pollen, turning them into a dull yellow parade of faded, tired beasts. The pollen-coating on their fur, skins and wool makes them appear very slightly further away, and more dead, than they actually are.

These broken fields are awash with June’s buttercups, glowing and bright in the sun. The whole upper side of the valley is a fractal legion of golden faces, a yellow multitude only occasionally punctured by tall clumps of thistles that look menacing and dark amongst so much golden shining.

Cattle, having broken down walls and burst through hedges, now freely mingle with squawking geese, going where they will. It is all very friendly, though earlier in the day the retinue had been overtaken by two escaped warring bulls that bucked and kicked and stampeded down the path in sideways bursts and kicks, stumbling and hurtling their horns against one another. They had met one of the bulls later in the morning on its side, along the path, a gash in its haunches, bawling sadly, its eyes raised towards them, baleful and confused, but it was toppled over by colic, not the horn that slashed it, its sides heaving and bursting with too much plenitude of rich grass, dark like the shade they are in, encompassed.

‘Noah’s vessel must have been a vehicle for great incestuous confusions and fornications,’ de Flunkl says to himself, almost happily, gazing at all the loose congregations of animals, and William of Roscrea gives, out of habit, his nodding assent.

Out of the forest, like another deeper echo or some auditory mirror, comes the tuneless humming la la la la, the perfect mimic to de Flunkl’s previous annoying humming.

Harold groans, beads of sweat blinding him, creating shards of light in his eyes like rainbows seen through a prism of crystal.

‘This,’ Harold says, ‘is no echo.’

‘Is this a bird?’ de Flunkl asks.