The railway tracks had been removed. If anyone had planned to turn the route into a nature walk, the scheme had been abandoned before they’d taken up the sleepers. The overgrown boards suggested stepping-stones over a medium less solid than the ground they were embedded in. To my right they climbed between grassy banks to follow a ridge that was eventually blocked by fallen trees, while on my left the route descended into a cutting. My aunt had written something about the latter in her journal, and if I was to gain any insight from my visit, presumably it would be there. I made for that end of the platform, where a slippery ramp led down to the remains of the track.

While the sleepers were spaced closely enough to invite my stride, they looked precarious with lichen, and I walked beside the vanished tracks instead. In a few hundred yards the ruddy sandstone walls were higher than my head. I could have fancied I was descending into a past embodied in the strata of the exposed rock, or at least my aunt might have had such an impression. Trees perched on the edges above me, their contorted roots gripping the cracked stone. Patches of the walls bulged with lurid fungi, and other stretches were mottled with moss. About a quarter of a mile ahead a road bridge crossed the cutting, and I was halfway to it when a voice spoke close to me. “In three hundred yards,” it said, “turn left onto Riders Lane.”

The walls must be distorting it, because it sounded untypically shrill. I thought I’d switched it off before pocketing the phone, but I made doubly certain now. Having stowed the phone again, I advanced to the bridge, where the arch was toothed with loose bricks. Its darkness closed over me as I glanced back. There was no sign of the station – just the artificial valley tapering into the distance. Of course the perspective was hiding the platforms, not to mention narrowing the gap between the walls, as if the perilously tilted trees were urging them together. Was this what my aunt had seen? She’d written something of the kind. I should have copied her journal onto my phone, as Roy had. If he and Bella came here they might venture further, and so I should. I was still under the bridge when my companion said “In a quarter of a mile turn left to your destination.”

He sounded shriller than before, no doubt because of the acoustic, and I had the grotesque notion that he was about to change gender. “I’m there already,” I informed him, and a voice that wasn’t his said “Ready” – my echo from the arch. I muted the phone and shoved it in my pocket, and then I set out from the bridge.