That we became briefly famous, as a village, owing to the findings at Trembling Hill, has also brought more people to the area. They said that she, the girl they discovered, was put to rest in a crouching position, facing the rising sun. This strikes me as not a position of dignity, but we are nearly the same at the end, underneath our airs and graces, our bonnets that we sometimes remember to wear into town, our tailored shirts and lacquered gentleman’s moustaches. I do not doubt that she did pass into the next world but I suspect it is as my father said and that world was a dispersed one, of trees, earth, flowing water, flowers and souls yet to be born, and that, contradictory to what her people thought, her amulets, clothes and tools did not go with her. It is still the same now: I have buried people with vases and quilts, with hammers and banjos, with cats… even once with a favoured mouse. I know every inch of the churchyard, know just how many Sarahs are in it (three), just how many Davids (sixteen), Williams (eleven) and Megs (seven), but there will, of course, be more beneath that, long forgotten. The stones will talk, I think, if you give them long enough. I still recoil from the younger headstones, the very clean ones that glint in the sun. They give me a chill. But as far as other chills are concerned, I have never seen a ghost here, nor a piskie. A newly qualified young doctor in the village, a golfing man by the name of Fitzpatrick who moved here from the west coast of Ireland into one of the ugly new houses, told me that on his way back across the tor after playing the back nine he was led astray in the mist, unable to get home and found himself mistakenly over by the ruin of the old barn that once belonged to the Warners, and said he saw a plume of smoke rising in the doorway, in the shape of a woman. I think he is a very imaginative man but I also do not doubt the moor’s intention to spin and confound people on its more vexed days. I have heard it claimed that the figure in the carvings on the font has been seen as an apparition, but few people have spent as much time in her manor as me and I have never set eyes on her, although curiously, she does often visit me in dreams.