I did not need to speak to my father to know of the story behind the stones on Trembling Hill, since it was common knowledge that each was a young girl who had been turned that way for the crime of dancing on the sabbath. Underhill has long nurtured a reputation amongst neighbouring parishes for breeding disobedient women and I have seen enough evidence with my own eyes to not doubt the reputation’s foundation. Many is the time that I saw a young lad from the village being led emphatically by the hand towards the woods by a member of the fairer sex, although it is seldom that I have seen the reverse. I often picked up an abandoned blouse or frock, corset or pair of breeches on my wanderings in Combe Woods. Houses being crowded places, where bedrooms were shared with siblings and even on occasion sheep and goats, more children than not were conceived under the stars. Our cottage, containing for many years just me, my mother, my father and Edward, was a relatively capacious anomaly, although my mother’s personality filled the space that would probably normally require six other persons of at least medium size. With each year she became more ornery, and with each year my father took another polite step back from asserting himself, perhaps hoping that it might placate her, when in fact it was an equation that seemed to make the opposite result, and finally he retreated so far back that he was entirely within his books and antiquarian concerns. It is from reading his diaries, and later his library, rather than any of my schooling, that I am able to put words on a page in the way you see before you now. He never missed an entry, and though some are rather mundane (‘grey rain, saw a strange horse outside Mrs Fitchett’s’), others are a document of alterations in the parish, the lores of the time, and his concerns about the frittering of our history in front of his very eyes. On 3 March 1871, he laments the vandalism of Hannaford’s Plob, the tomb of a fifteenth-century hunter, by local builders who repurposed the stones for new cottages on the moor’s north-east side. Later that month, he talks of watching a young couple in the village pass their newborn through the forked trunk of an ash tree, to cure the child’s nascent cough: a custom I have heard about from other sources but not seen evidence of for nigh on four decades. ‘Edward twisted fiveways insensible with drink,’ says the entry for 5 September 1883, and nothing more. ‘Solstice. Bilious. Coach to Newton,’ the diary is told on 21 June 1882. ‘Flowers for Dorothy. Not bright enough.’ By this point, the feared Alfred had passed away, being replaced at the pulpit by his son, Cedric, a far milder character and keen early student of photography. My father had a stout and rewarding relationship with Cedric, especially after – if memory serves right – my father saved his life by pushing him out the way of a falling gargoyle during a storm in 1887.