Megan Beaker: The Black Tree has always been what everyone in the village has called it. Nobody alive remembers a time when it wasn’t there and wasn’t black. A perplexing runt amongst its tall confident siblings, it never gets bigger, never dies, never withers. It is a tree of perpetual winter, a tree devoid of the relief of seasonal change. When people walk past it they often find their electronic devices misbehaving. Watches stop. Torches catch fire. Phones zap embarrassing photos to half-acquaintances, unbidden. It is said that many centuries ago a robber of the road – possibly one of the gang they called the Gribblins – was left to die in an iron cage attached to an earlier, blacker tree on the same spot, his last meal being three candles fed to him by a local resident, but that is just a story, teased and tickled by time. What is known for certain is that sheep have often been found dead on the boulder beneath the tree, rivulets of blood spilling from one eye. When lightning hit the tree during the early 1960s, a disgraced limping clergyman in his final half-decade of life, who’d settled here from up country, saw the entire trunk change to white and a face wag its wet tongue at him from the bark, but when he recounted the tale in the Stonemason’s Arms later that evening, its authenticity was discredited because of his reputation, but also because he was quick with gin at the time and wearing an item of knitwear back to front.

Alan Rockwell: Thank you for this, Megan. Most edifying, and largely new to me. I have made a note in my journal.

Sheila Winfarthing: I remember that lightning strike well. 1962. Or maybe ’63. I wasn’t aware you were here as well back then, Megan.

Megan Beaker: I had already been here a long time by then.

Ted Wentworth: Sheep know 99 easy ways to die but are always searching hard for the 100th.

Gary Oliver: Stone sheds now toasty on these chillier nights. Thanks again to Penelope for the oil.

Mark Laggs: Ted some of your wall has come down up by Nettle Field. I saw a ewe on the road. Could be yours too?

Ted Wentworth: Thanks, I’ll check. Could be Cavendish’s.