What if she got there and knocked on his door and there was no answer and when she pushed it open the place was empty and cleared out and there was nothing up there but his sheep and a couple of starving dogs?

In winter, months went by sometimes without a sign of him. Then there’d be a storm, a heavy fall of snow, and he’d be up there with his dogs, digging out his buried sheep. The dogs trickling over the white hillside, showing him where to put his shovel so he could bring them out alive. In spring, around lambing time, she woke sometimes in the dark and saw the pin-prick beam of his torch moving over the sloping fields as he went about checking on things.

Over the years her father’s scattered parish had dwindled away.

One by one the farms had emptied out. The old had died, the young and the middle-aged had moved away. Where there’d been two shops and a pub, a school and a recreation room there were only the carcasses of buildings. When her father died, no one was sent to replace him. Where there’d been people and families and children there was only her left now, and Michael Creed.

Who would have thought a place could fall in on itself so quickly? That so monumental a ruin could be achieved like that? Almost, it seemed to her sometimes, it had happened in the blink of an eye, or in the course of one brief night while she slept.

Hikers who came up this far poked their faces in at her window. They seemed amazed to see curtains, chimney smoke, her boots at the door. Once, coming back from the church, she’d found a young couple in woollen hats and waterproof jackets on the step at the back of her house, picnicking on crisps and sandwiches and hot tea from a thermos. They’d hardly seemed to believe her when she said she lived here, and when they’d gone she thought of them telling their friends about the woman they’d found living way up at the far end of the valley by herself, using the words she’d overheard her sister Pam and her brother Frank whispering to each other when they came and thought she was outside, words like squalid, primitive, unhygienic.