The sun had gone, and with its going the western sky drained of colour, leaving one bright star in a swimming sea of green. I stood still. It was very quiet, so quiet that I could hear the sound of my horse cropping the turf, and the thin jingle of his bit as he moved. The only other sound was the whispering chatter of nesting starlings among the great trilithons overhead. The starling is a bird sacred to the druids, and I had heard that in past time the Dance had been used for worship by the druid priests. There are many stories about the Dance, how the stones were brought from Africa, and put up by giants of old, or how they were the giants themselves, caught and turned to stone by a curse as they danced in a ring. But it was not giants or curses that were breathing the cold now from the ground and from the stones; these stones had been put here by men, and their raising had been sung by poets, like the old blind man of Brittany. A lingering shred of light caught the stone near me; the huge knob of stone on one sandstone surface echoed the hole in the fallen lintel alongside it. These tenons and sockets had been fashioned by men, craftsmen such as I had watched almost daily for the last few years, in Less Britain, then in York, London, Winchester. And massive as they were, giants’ building as they seemed to be, they had been raised by the hands of workmen, to the commands of engineers, and to the sound of music such as I had heard from the blind singer of Kerrec.

I walked slowly forward across the circle’s centre. The faint light in the western sky threw my shadow slanting ahead of me, and etched, momentarily in fleeting light, the shape of an axe, two-headed, on one of the stones. I hesitated, then turned to look. My shadow wavered and dipped. I trod in a shallow pit and fell, measuring my length.

It was only a depression in the ground, the kind that might have been made, years past, by the falling of one of the great stones. Or by a grave . . .

There was no stone nearby of such a size, no sign of digging, no one buried here. The turf was smooth, and grazed by sheep and cattle, and under my hands as I picked myself up slowly, were the scented, frilled stars of daisies. But as I lay I had felt the cold strike up from below, in a pang as sudden as an arrow striking, and I knew that this was why I had been brought here.

I caught my horse, mounted and rode the two miles back to my father’s birthplace.

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