One day, when Pat was with her crows, turning the soil for her and for them, she found an axe. It’s still only her and the crows who know about it, to this day. It’s a quite remarkable axe, a little over ten inches long, apparently unused, and dating from 700 bc, although it might seem a little less remarkable if you knew just how many axes of a similar vintage were still buried on the moor. There are even a couple in the river around a mile further up the valley from Pat’s, not far from the empty building the map calls Megan’s House. I doubt they’ll be found any time soon, as it’s not a bit of the river people often have cause to get into. The ravine is too narrow and you couldn’t get a boat down there. I could tell you properly about what is still buried here, down under the rivers, in the peat, in the soil beneath the reservoirs beneath the old farmland that they drowned to build them, and it would blow your mind into a million tiny pieces, which you’d never find again, and then those pieces would also sink into the earth, forever. So much is buried, so far down, and we live – even the more archaeologically inclined amongst us – only on the top one or two layers. Just as you can’t any longer get to what Pat once was because it’s buried under what Pat has become, with only the odd shard or two coming to the surface, you can’t really reach the past of here, the past of me, and what I am made up of. But that does not mean it is not still there.

My thoughts didn’t always take this form. I could have told you plenty of things but the language I spoke in was not the one I speak in now. ‘Nope, sorry,’ you would have said. ‘That’s just a noise.’ But then the noise would have stayed with you, shaken you, loosened your bowels. You would have found great difficulty in not thinking about it, especially in the capacious hours just before dawn. But even then the noise was relatively comprehensible and well mannered by comparison to what it had been. Once, much further back, the noise came with fire and lava. Did it? I feel like I know it did, but it was so long ago, so all I can do is trust in the innateness of that feeling. And then the inevitable question follows: How did I go from that to this? How did I become so sapped, so self-conscious? How did I get this tediously well behaved?

It’s your fault. You’re seeping into me, in all your ways. You’ve been doing it for millennia, but you do it much more than ever now.