Cooper commented on the quality of the land, usually a good ice breaker with a farmer who looked as though he’d been around for a while and could take the credit for it. Across the yard, he could see an empty cow shed, and the padlocked door to what must have been the milking parlour.

‘Yes, it used to be all fields and cows round here,’ said Massey, then paused for a moment. ‘Now it’s just fields.’

When Cooper explained that he wanted to see the route up to Birchlow that the old man had described, Massey wiped his hands on a rag and led him out of the yard. The farmhouse itself was a typical jumble of extensions and additions cluttering the outline of the original eighteenth-century building. A low profile against the Pennine winds, solid stone walls thick enough to keep out the cold.

‘My father would have been upset that I gave up the dairy herd,’ said the farmer as they passed through a gate and into the first field. ‘He bred some nice Friesian crosses. Wonderful milkers, they were. But not good enough. No cows would have been good enough.’

‘You inherited this farm from your father?’ asked Cooper.

‘Aye. And he took it over from his father. Lord, I was out in this yard helping with the morning milking by the time I was ten years old.’

‘You must have a lot of memories, then.’

Massey’s eyes clouded for a moment. He was gazing at the hillside, rather than at the house and buildings. Perhaps he felt he’d grown up out there in the fields, rather than indoors.

‘You might say that. Yes, I’ve got a lot of my memories bound up in this land. Buried now, some of them.’

They followed the line of the dry-stone wall as it snaked across the contours of the hillside, following the dips and hollows. At a couple of points it was intersected by similar walls running at right angles to it, dividing the fields into long, sloping strips of land. Ahead of him, Cooper could see miles and miles of wall, an endless limestone tracery overlaying the landscape.

Massey stopped, removed his cap and scratched his head. His hair was wispy, and that distinctive sandy colour common among people whose distant ancestors had been Scandinavian settlers. Remarkable how that Viking blood had persisted through the generations.

‘I reckon you must be talking about the bridlepath over there,’ he said. ‘We call it Badger’s Way in these parts. It connects up with Black Harry Lane. You can get up to Black Harry Gate and way over to Longstone without going anywhere near a road, if you have a mind to.’

‘A bridlepath. So it can be used by horse riders, not just walkers?’

‘Aye. It would have been a packhorse road, I suppose, in the old days. It was made for horses. Trouble is, we tend to get motorbikes up here of a weekend. Those things muddy it up for everybody.’