‘They built things to last back then, but after eight hundred years they need extensive maintenance to remain intact.’

‘I guess it’s been like this for a long time?’

‘As long as anyone can remember.’

‘There’s an arch the families built, where Isla and Gavan were supposed to have been buried—do you know where that is?’

‘We can drive there on the way back,’ he said as they walked towards the ruins in companionable silence.

Elle tried to imagine how the place must have once looked, filling in the missing walls and adding floors and windows, towers at the front and battlements. They walked through a gap where a huge front door must once have stood and Elle looked around, turning to get her bearings.

‘How do you know that it had four storeys?’ she asked curiously.

‘If you look up at this interior wall,’ he said, pointing, ‘you can see square cuts in the stone at regular intervals. That’s where the beams were once in place to support the floor above. It goes up four levels.’

‘It must have been massive.’

‘It was.’

‘You’ve had your whole life to explore this place. You must know it pretty well.’

‘I was only supposed to come here with an adult,’ he said, his head tipped back as though searching the craggy rock wall, before he looked back down at her with a grin, ‘but occasionally I’d manage to sneak away and come here to explore on my own.’

‘I guess it would be too tempting to have your very own castle in your backyard and not come to play,’ she agreed, though she hated to think of all the dangers a place like this presented to a child up here all alone.

Elle picked her way across the rocky floor, poking her head into small arch entrances and then climbing a curved section of staircase that led to a landing one floor up. Beneath was a small, ceiling-less room that rose high above her like a tall, narrow chamber into the sky.

‘I believe this part of the lower floor used to be the kitchen. The black soot marks on the stone wall would have come from some kind of large open-fire oven.’

‘What a shame there isn’t more of it left intact,’ she said thoughtfully as they continued carefully across the uneven ground.

‘So, tell me,’ Stuart said, ‘what do you do back in Australia?’ Elle looked at him quickly as she picked her way across the rubble. ‘Nothing terribly exciting. I work … worked,’ she amended wryly, ‘in a supermarket.’

‘You don’t work there anymore?’ he asked.

‘No. They put me off in favour of a self-service checkout. Welcome to the era of robots taking over.’

‘What are you going to do when you go back?’

‘You sound like my mother,’ Elle told him dryly.

‘Ah, I see.’

‘What do you see?’ Elle asked, stopping to look at him.

‘You have a mother with opinions about your future.’