You can see the Daughters of Stone from the top of our lighthouse. In fact, it feels as if you can see the whole world from up here. On a clear day the outline of the French coast is just visible on the other side of the broad, yawning Channel. The harbour is down there to the right, and our village, Stonegate, is tucked away just behind it, in the lee of the cliffs. When the tide is out you can just see Dragon Bay – that long, thin, sandy beach below the chalky south cliff that runs most of the way from here to Dover. If you turn and look the other way, the English farmland stretches out in an enormous patchwork of green and gold – hundreds of oddly-shaped fields all stitched together with hedgerows and dark woodland. Little groups of houses cluster around church spires, clinging to the roads that thread between the fields.

Because there are windows all the way around the lantern room, you can keep turning and turning, and soon the sea and fields, sea and fields, sea and fields become a blue-green blur and you have to sit down.

If you go through the door and out on to the walkway, and if you are brave enough to look down, you will see the standing stones beneath you. The wind out there is nearly always fierce and blustering, even in the summer. The four stones wrap around the seaward side of the lighthouse, like part of an enormous clock face, half-buried in the turf of the clifftop. I think the stones are the main reason that our lighthouse has always been known as the Castle. From a distance, the Daughters of Stone seem to be buttresses or guard towers, or even stony sentinels, facing out towards the sea and the storms, watching for enemies.

I had always liked the fact that there were four standing stones, just like the four of us – Mutti and Pa, Mags and me. The symmetry pleased me – each of us had our own stone. The smallest one was mine – furthest to the left, pointed at the top like a diamond. When we were little, Mags and I would pretend the stones were mountains to climb, or islands in a sea churning with predators – and we would use ropes and rocks and bits of wood to get from one stone to the next without getting our legs bitten off. I remember Mags brandishing a toy sword, using it to slash at the slimy tentacles that had twisted around me and were dragging me down into the inky, blood-black depths of the ocean . . . Pa told us to be careful. He said the stones were megaliths – they were thousands of years old, and if we wanted them to last another thousand years, we probably shouldn’t be scrabbling about all over them.