And the landscape opened up in front of me.

It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Over the road the plain spread away, flatter than I imagined land could be, but somehow it seemed I was also high up because not far above the soggy green expanse, a dark grey layer of cloud slid over the earth, perfectly parallel, not touching at any point. The plain stretched away, east, south, west, every way I turned, the same in every direction, finishing in the distance with a line of blueish-brown hills on every horizon. In each paddock there was a curious mound of boulders, all different sizes, but generally twice the height of a person and about thirty steps around: a mini-mountain for every meadow. And around them, in the thin slices of living space between earth and low-hanging sky, sheep milled about, chewing the new shoots in the sodden grass, spreading themselves evenly across the fabric of the land, like dots on a dress.

I breathed in deeply. The cold air filled my lungs with a fresh green smell of earth and grass. The wind tugged at my hair and clothes but moved nothing of the treeless landscape in front of me.

I peered down the road. Who knew how far the next stop was?

It still seemed like my best option. I could wave a bus down if I had to. I could stand in the road – make it stop for me. I turned quickly to head back to the house and collect my things. And I gasped.

There, on the other side of a blasted gravel driveway from the little house, looming large and stark in the middle of all this flat landscape, stood a towering bluestone box; the shell of a once-grand Victorian farmhouse mansion.

It was a shock, turning and finding it there, looming behind the little house. It seemed incongruous that something so large had been just standing there, completely unnoticed by me. I almost felt like it had snuck up on me. Like it had been quietly watching me.

In all of that landscape, everywhere the same as everywhere else, the hulking form of the ruined mansion seemed like it had landed from outer space. It had a shallow triangle roof with no eaves at all, just two-storey walls standing as blank shields to the wind. And despite feeling like it had been secretly watching me, when I properly looked at its cliff-faced expanse, I saw that most of its windows were boarded, and it actually seemed like it was trying not to look around. Only two glass windows remained in their sockets, one at the bottom south end and one at the top north, and when the sun came out for a moment they glinted and gave the facade a cockeyed appearance.

I walked down the gravel driveway to have a closer look. The bareness of the old house was odd; it made it look more like a prison building than a house. At first I didn’t understand it, but then I saw telltale marks on the walls and realised a verandah must have once run around it. I imagined the skirt of it there, like a decorative frill, softening the house, shading it, like a little girl all dressed up; suddenly it made sense, and the place looked like it might have once actually been someone’s home.