The Dig & the Dog

By William Somerset

The archaeological excavation in Ribchester's Pootlegate, on the site of the former church of St Grenden the Less, a long femur's throw from the city's cathedral, was now well and truly into its third season. Three core workers, the erudite Ambrose Gillespie, his line manager Inkpen, and Mordant, a sort of tenured dogsbody with an accumulated knowledge of the process and hard graft of site excavation, had been working through the winter overseeing rubble removal and site preparation. Now the site was springing to life as a small team of student archaeologists, volunteer ditch diggers and assorted other shovel bums unpacked their trowels and began scraping away at the soil. Amongst them, a young Cornishman, Ruan Meriasek Kenver Nankervis - Ruskin to his friends - attracted by the plentiful supply of girls from the Institute, the potency of the local cider, and the opportunity to earn some money to pay down his debts.
This summer, surely, they would reach the remains of Roman Ribchester.
The existing archaeological evidence from just outside the city pointed to a settlement of an Iron Age tribe called the Anchovi sometime before the Roman occupation. Their hilltop fort was sacked with great slaughter by the Romans for resisting their civilising influence. Then there was the local legend that the cruel and despotic Emperor Septimus Severus had been in Ribchester in 210CE on his journey north to reoccupy the Antonine Wall.
If the Ribchester Archeaological Trust could demonstrate that the Emperor had indeed walked the streets of the city then the fame of its Director, Michael Inkpen, or so he liked to think, would rival that of Howard Carter, who had won immortality by discovering the tomb of Tutankhamen at Thebes.
In the meantime there was the midden to excavate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Somerset
• Release date: Oct 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301894567

Book preview

THE DIG & THE DOG

If you like your humour dry, deadpan and at times more than a tad slapstick then The Dig and the Dog will provide a deliciously slow burn. Hapless protagonist Ruskin is a young man who furrows his own plough in a summer of archaeological excavation, mayhem and madness. It’s a story by turns scatological, quirky, erudite and laugh out loud funny with acute observation of the English, reliably eccentric at work and at play, usually with a glass of the mind altering local cider in hand.  I feel a cult coming on. This is a one off!

Ros Irvine

This book is very funny and very clever, a sort of Blott on the Landscape meets Time Team. It’s terrific stuff. I am beginning to feel the shadow of human tragedy in this story, as well as the mists of pathos and the brazen blaze of farce. The writing is fluent and the plot threads are woven together strongly. The novel has an exuberance that I like very much. It’s a great read.

Celia Francis

THE DIG & THE DOG

Published by Richard Skinner at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Richard Skinner

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Lydia Skinner

THE DIG & THE DOG

‘Is it Roman?’ she asked, hopefully, handing Ruskin a jagged piece of grey, crudely formed pottery.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he replied, rinsing the fragment clean in a plastic washing-up bowl and returning it to the young student digger. Iduna shrugged her head in disappointment, and Ruskin watched as her fine ash-blonde hair seemed to dance in the light. ‘It’s probably part of a cooking pot,’ he added. Ruskin wasn’t a great talker, most of the time.

‘So hot today,’ she said, trying to prolong the contact, squinting at Ruskin in the bright June sunshine as now she passed him some shards of bone. Ruskin noticed the sweat stains under her arms. She was earthy, this woman, attractive like a blonde troll perhaps, with an elemental vitality.

‘Hot as down a tin-mine,’ he replied, looking at the finds, yet more sheep bones.

They stood outside the long wooden hut, Ruskin’s pot-washing office, set back from the street and hidden from its view by a site-fence, made in part of exterior grade hardboard and the rest of salvaged sheets of corrugated iron. At one end of the site there was the large and deep oblong shape of the excavation, and at the other, an ever growing heap of soil and rubble. The rubbish that had for centuries decayed below Pootlegate now rose triumphantly above it.

Down in the hole, a small volunteer workforce solemnly sweated over the Anglo-Saxon detritus, trowelling and sifting through thousand year old discarded trash.

‘Do you like it here?’ Ruskin asked Iduna, hoping to detain her for a minute more.

‘I need the experience,’ she responded. ‘In Finland we have already dug everything up. We have a saying: ‘the shrimp that sleeps is carried away by the current.’

Ruskin nodded slowly, pretending to understand what this meant. Under the guise of stretching, he flexed a few muscles. His rather Spartan upbringing on the edges of Bodmin Moor had given Ruskin, he liked to think, an appealing, granite grittiness, and the years of surfing from Transgowen Sands had built significant upper-body muscle that hopefully compensated for his average height.

‘And you? How did you get to here?’

‘They were digging at Trewortha Tor, down near my mum’s home, a few years ago, and I got interested. They let me help out with some of the heavy stuff; you can see I’m built more for that sort of work.’ He paused for effect. ‘The first year here we dug out the foundations of the demolished church.’

Then to Ruskin’s sharp surprise, Iduna reached into her trouser pockets and took out a small pipe from one side and a packet of shag tobacco from the other. After a moment or so Iduna was enveloped in a sweet smelling fug. Along the way, bells chimed the hour and Ruskin looked up towards the cathedral, an impressive cliff of limestone masonry that towered over the chimney pots and roof tops of the old town. The bells had become an integral punctuation to life on the site.

Anthony Gillespie came across to have a look: Anthony Ambrose Folland Gillespie, Deputy Chief Archaeologist at the Trust, now in his early thirties, taller and leaner than Ruskin, with the look and the outfit of an archaeologist digging in the ruins of Ninevah rather than an English provincial city, this man had an encyclopaedic knowledge of sheep remains; his dissertation on the comparison of fully-fused limb-bone epiphyses of medieval Orkney ewes with those of Roman sheep from Owlswick in Somerset was required reading for third year undergraduates on the animal remains programme at the Institute.

‘Part of a sheep metacarpus,’ he pronounced, fingering the remnant, ‘about 24 months old when it was slaughtered.’

‘As I thought,’ said Ruskin, trying to catch Iduna’s eye through the tobacco smoke, ‘Not Roman.’

‘I am meaning the pottery,’ she answered, showing Gillespie the newly-washed fragment.

‘No, no, just more crude, unglazed Anglo-Saxon earthenware,’ said Gillespie, rather abruptly dismissing the find.

‘A cup perhaps?’ suggested a still hopeful Iduna.

‘Their pottery is just too rough for tableware. They generally used wooden tableware so it’s probably part of a sort of cooking pot made by the coil method.’

‘Ah, the coil method.’ said Ruskin, nodding.

‘Pottery wheels were a lost technology at this time. We could get Annette to do a lipid analysis, if she can find the time away from her sun worship.’

In tandem, Gillespie and Ruskin looked over to the end of the site and there, to one side of the mature walnut tree, on the only patch of available grass, was Annette making the most of the strong June sunshine. She had stripped down to her robustly engineered bikini.

‘Lipids?’ sniffed Ruskin, trying to regain his concentration.

‘Yes, if it was part of a cooking vessel then there would be fats absorbed into the surface, or wax or oils, but most likely saturated fatty acids from stewing lamb or pork with leafy vegetables to make a tasty and nutritious broth.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Now, Iduna,’ continued Gillespie in a slightly paternal manner, ‘Have you had your tetanus booster? Grubbing around in a graveyard is hazardous: soil pathogens could be waiting to strike.’

‘Of course, Mr. Gillespie.’

‘We’ve come across a few bits of dog coprolites too, a sort of fossilised shit, with indications of whip-worm and roundworm parasitic infestation which they must have shared these with their owners. Man’s best friend eh?’

‘I wash my hands under running water twice a day, Mr. Gillespie.’

‘Me too,’ added Ruskin.

‘Be aware that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis carried in the bite of a flea that has first feasted on an infected rodent can survive in the soil over long periods of time. So, without being alarmist, watch out for the initial symptoms of sudden fever, headache, muscle pain, nausea, to be followed by painful swelling of the lymph nodes. It’s fast too: you eat lunch with your friends and dine with your ancestors in paradise.’

‘And before my lunch, I wash then again,’ claimed an alarmed Iduna.

‘Me too.’

‘And don’t go stroking any stray cats or dogs that get on site,’ added Gillespie, turning to leave. ‘Even their fur can host the plague bacillus.’

‘Bring the pot inside and I’ll give it a snap,’ Ruskin instructed Iduna after Gillespie had returned to his section drawing, which, like all his work, was completed with precise attention to detail. The hut was, if anything, even hotter inside than out, and the air tired and clammy.

‘So many bones,’ Iduna said, poking at the piles of human remains held inside cardboard boxes under trestle tables. ‘So many dear people.’

‘I think you mean ‘dead’. We are digging in an old churchyard after all. Don’t touch them!’ warned Ruskin. ‘Property of the Church of England and covered by the 1563 Witches Act, or something like that.’

The bones awaited removal to a Church of England cemetery. A condition imposed on the excavation was that all remains dug from the site of St Grenden’s had to be appropriately reinterred, although fish bones were probably exempt. The churchyard had been in use for over a thousand years and that meant a lot of bones. The last burial was less than a century old and the removal of remains was not always straightforward. Family vaults had to be broken into, often piled high with sealed lead coffins, and any accidental puncture with a mattock or a pick would release a truly terrible stink.

Iduna hesitated and Ruskin took her arm and steered it way from the boxes. He sensed an opportunity.

‘Do you like England? I mean, do you miss home?’ he asked.

‘We have a saying: this place blueberry; own place strawberry.’

‘Yes, very true.’ replied Ruskin, catching on to Iduna’s way of expressing herself. ‘Cornwall is far away and I miss it.’

‘So you are not English?’

‘I am a foreigner like you.’

They exchanged smiles.

‘Some of the English are odd,’ continued Iduna. ‘I don’t like the way Mr. Gillespie refers to people as ‘life-forms’.’

‘Yes, he lacks the common touch - went to a public school. Big brain though.’

The archaeological dig in Ribchester's Pootlegate, on the site of the former church of St Grenden the Less, a long femur’s throw from the cathedral, was now well and truly into its third season. The dig had lain mainly dormant for most of the year because the recession had removed any urgency from the excavation. Three core workers, Gillespie, his line manager Inkpen, and Mordant, a sort of tenured dogsbody with an accumulated knowledge of the process and hard graft of site excavation, had been working through the winter and spring overseeing further rubble removal and site preparation. But now the site had sprung to life as a small team of student archaeologists, volunteer ditch diggers and assorted other shovel bums unpacked their trowels and started scraping away. From the end of May the summer volunteers had started to trickle in, earnest but attractive girls from the Institute in London for the most part, and also some pretty Northern Europeans including Iduna. This year, they would surely reach Roman Ribchester.

The Ribchester Archaeological Trust employed Ruskin to record and clean the site finds, his meagre subsistence pay funded partly through Objective One funding from the European Union and partly from sponsorship through the property company that would be redeveloping the site.

Ruskin owed his modest promotion from digger to pot-washer after fish bones had been recovered in an exploratory trench dug the previous summer. He had been able to identify some saltwater fish remains, cod, herring, shad and haddock. Then there were traces of sturgeon and burbot, and other freshwater fish like perch and pike, as well as carp and eel. The preservation of all this organic material was caused by the oxygen-free waterlogged soil so close to the River Rib that prevented decomposition and decay. Anoxic, Gillespie called it.

Ruskin’s peculiar genius had not been in the identification alone. After an evening on the cider with Gillespie and the others, Ruskin had realised the significance, and his words came much more quickly than usual.

‘First they fished out the rivers and lakes locally. Then they got fish from further away because you won’t get a sturgeon in a river like the Rib. And the sea fish, salted or soused, must have been brought to the city from far away. You get a lot of burbot in Norway and colder places like that.

‘All of which must reflect important trade links as well the site in continuous use from the eighth century, if we cross-reference with the other things we’ve found.’

‘Lots of good fish,’ emphasised Ruskin.

‘Feasting,’ hypothesized Gillespie. ‘We may be digging on a site of some ceremonial significance.’

‘Or a takeaway.’

A fish event horizon, Gillespie had called it.

In Ruskin’s pot washing shed, Iduna seemed reluctant to return to her work.

‘So, you’re Iduna?’ questioned Ruskin, who had yet to learn all the names of the new interns.

‘Yes, as you can guess, it’s a Finnish name. Iduna is a goddess of beauty and apples and fertility.’

‘Iduna, you are a beautiful goddess, then.’

She was delighted at Ruskin’s refracted words and feeling permission to move closer to him, she said, fascinated, ‘Your eyes, they are the colour of the sea.’

‘The blue green of the Atlantic, my mum always says, on account of our family,’ explained Ruskin as he must have done many times before. ‘And yours, Iduna, are clear blue.’

‘Blue eyes say, love me or I die.’

‘I like those Finnish proverbs,’ said Ruskin with a wide smile.

Ruskin had been born in late February twenty years ago. The birth took place on the eastern side of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, down from Garron Tor, in a tepee belonging to his mother, Metheven Nankervis, in a patch of damp, scrub-woodland of wind-battered trees by the side of a tributary of a tributary of the River Inny, with water rushing off the moor. Not the best place for a tepee really. Nor for a home-birth. But as his mother lived in the tepee that’s where the home birth had to be.

His father had been a pilchard fisherman out of Penzance who had met Ruskin’s mother briefly but intently in the madness and intemperance of Padstow’s ‘Obby ‘Oss day. A few months later the Humbaba was lost at sea and the nascent Ruskin was fatherless.

As was the Cornish custom, a groaning cake had been baked by Metheven’s friends to ease the mother’s labour. Rhiannon had gathered water from the ancient well at St Clether. Ennor brought stone ground flour from the mill at Penhaddon. Demelva brought eggs from her hens. Metheven cracked the eggs herself.

The dazed, bereft, delighted and exhausted mother swaddled the new born infant to herself and kept them both warm, as best she could, by feeding a three stone fire with sticks and twigs, gathered through the months of pregnancy and kept dry under black plastic sheeting, that filled the tepee with wood smoke.

After some months of convalescence, her strength returned, Metheven and baby together with friends set off past Buttern Hill down the narrow lane with high-banked hedges spilling over with flowering gorse and swags of thick moss towards the mighty granite tower of the church of St Nonna at Altarnun to have the baby upraised. It was a fine day in late April. They entered the churchyard through the moorstone back gate in a joyful, chattering, colourful procession. The churchyard was a rich green and yellow of primroses, wild daffodils and vivid celandine, bright as the sun itself. Brimstone butterflies danced in the pools of light. Around them, jackdaws hopped on top of leaning slate gravestones, looking on with interest and greeting the procession with cries of "Jack-Jack, Jack-Jack".

The priest needed an address for the register. Where was the tepee exactly? It wasn’t quite Tregunnon nor really Trewen but neither was it Trekennick nor as east as Trevell, nor as elevated as Tredarras nor as low lying as Trevell which surely would have taken you into the next parish of St Sativola at Laneast. The priest wrote Tretepee and hoped it wouldn’t be noticed.

Rhiannon, Ennor and Demelva were to be the godmothers but as for godfathers, well, the jackdaws would have to suffice. The baby, well-smoked like a kipper, was dipped down into the thousand year old font with its carved human faces and emerged as Ruan Meriasek Kenver Nankervis – Cornish now in name as well as blood. Ruan and Meriasek as Cornish saints, Kenver as great chief and Nankervis after his mum. Over time it got shortened to just Ruskin.

Ruskin’s early years were destined to be peripatetic as his mother tried to keep one step ahead of the planning department of Cornwall County Council by moving her tepee from one river valley to the next in a broad arc around Bodmin Moor, or Fawythal as Metheven knew it. So school was intermittent at first. For Ruskin it meant a childhood of fresh air and foraging. Even as an infant he was put to work, gathering dandelions, nettles and new hawthorn leaves for his mother’s funny teas and stews. As other children were learning their alphabet, Ruskin would be on his belly by a stream, one arm frozen ice cold by the water as he waited for a fat brown trout to succumb to the faintest flicker of his fingers. Later he would be able to sink into those same pools and sometimes come up with a protesting crayfish to add to the pot. Soon he could bring down pigeons with his catapult and snaring a rabbit was easy meat. Racing an unequal race with hares kept him fit. Once, running up a hill, eyes down, he had failed to notice the approaching edge of a granite outcrop and had fallen heavily. He never liked heights after that.

Every summer, Metheven sent the growing boy away to stay with his father’s family to help out on the boats, hauling up pots of spider crab and lobster or to work in the shack where monkfish and gurnard, John Dory and huss were gutted and cleaned before being laid out for inspection and sale to curious summer visitors.

Back on the Moor, autumn meant rose-hips and crab apples and mushrooms. His mother would issue the young boy with a small flat-bottomed wicker carrier to search for ‘shrooms, ‘semis’ she called them, and Ruskin knew all the best sheep-grazed places to bring back a basket-full. If there was enough and more, a pound was the reward for his labour. Afterwards, his mother would become animated, excited then drowsy by turns.

When he was older Ruskin got a tepee of his own.

But the education authorities were closing in, determined to track down this boy whose budget allocation so many schools claimed as their own. First came a fine for Metheven, then a community sentence, but finally it was the threat of prison for his mother that drove Ruskin to go and live with an aunt and unwillingly to school. To Ruskin’s own surprise, he liked the routine that school afforded, and the attention and drip-feed affirmation from the teachers and although there remained deep, dark holes in his knowledge of the world and his process of socialization forever incomplete, he flourished after a fashion.

Summer term at the University of the Broads ended on the twenty third of May. Ruskin was based on the Lowestoft campus where he studied Piscene Economics. Say what you like about the University of the Broads – its entry requirements are not the most rigorous and the institution as a whole is unranked in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s league table of the world’s top five thousand universities – but its Fish Faculty had received five stars from the prestigious Center for Higher Education Development, published in Die Zeit the previous autumn.

It had been an unusual choice of degree and his teachers had tried to persuade Ruskin into something more mainstream but he had been stubborn. Perhaps it had something to do with the sinking of the Humbaba all those years ago.

Actually, Ruskin had been away for most of the academic year on a thick, paid sandwich attachment in the mussel marketing department of the Highlands and Islands Crustacean Development Board in Oban where from his workplace window he had for months watched the ferries from Coll and Tiree, Benbecula and Baraa hurry in and battle out of the port.

Ruskin had been too tardy in choosing his placement. He had at first been tempted by an ocean-going opportunity with Fasfu, the Frozen at Sea Fillets Association, but the extended time on a trawler in the remote Barents Sea, far beyond any signal for his mobile phone, dissuaded him. There had also been a rather exciting opening at the Drax coal fired powered station that was experimenting with the use of waste hot water to grow Nile Tilapia fingerlings. He had been too slow to snap up the opening on the Mekong Delta to study farmed Vietnamese Catfish – the voracious Pangasius. This was generously funded by Federation of Fish Fryers eager to find a replacement in fish suppers for the disappearing cod, whose attempts to rebrand the alien fish as River Cobbler had yet to win general consumer approval, perhaps because the fish came with more air miles than British Airway’s most frequent frequent flyer, or more likely, because it tasted like marinated dish cloth.

Anyway, term had come to an end. Ruskin’s time in Scotland had been well spent and his dissertation on squat lobsters written on his return to Lowestoft was almost complete - except for footnotes and citations - so he felt good about packing his panniers, locking the door on his room and starting the long, long cycle ride westwards towards his third summer of exhumation and pot washing with the Ribchester Archaeological Trust.

If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step then Ruskin’s slightly shorter trip started with a firm press on the pedals and a ring of his bicycle bell to scatter wayward pedestrians. He planned to follow the route of previous years and would need no map; get the sun behind the bike in the morning and pedal forwards. It seemed to work.

For Ruskin, teetering on the razor sharp edge of the poverty line, some poorly paid work was better than nothing, and accommodation came free in a rambling Edwardian house that the Trust used as a hostel for its itinerant workers.

The lack of money was proving a great and tiresome inconvenience to Ruskin. He had never known what it was to have a walletful of his own cash. His mother's irregular employment and regular substance abuse made it a struggle to stay solvent each month.

The degree in Piscene Economics had provided a fast track to indebtedness. First came, and went with alacrity, a student loan. Ruskin hit his overdraft limit halfway through the second term. The bank complained. He threatened to take his overdraft elsewhere. The bank called his bluff and closed his account. Then came the plastic: loyalty credit cards, interest free balance transfers, 0% on new purchases, high interest store cards. It had all been too easy. They may have taught A-level economics at Camborne Community College but personal finance had not been on the syllabus. For short periods of time his life support came from friends and acquaintances willing to lend him money but, like Treasury Bills, they demanded timely and full repayment. He needed something longer lasting, like a bond, to see him through his years of higher education. Possible rescue had come two summers previously from a display advert in the Ribchester Evening Chronicle:‘Need Extra Cash?’ read the insidious invitation. What a strange question, thought Ruskin as he punched the local number into his mobile and asked to be put through to a financial advisor.

‘What do you want?’ demanded Samson Price, abruptly, at the other end of the phone.

There had been an interview in an office above an antique shop in Pootlegate. It took a while to establish a common protocol

‘Down on your uppers then?’ asked Samson Price, a sweaty sort of man whose middle-age spread wobbled like a living, giant panna cotta pudding.

‘Eh?’

‘Stony broke?’

‘What?’

‘Short of a wad? In need of some readies?

‘I need some money.’

Price paused and reconsidered his approach: to be cool in the language of the street you need to be in the right street to start with.

‘Maxed out on your plastic?’

‘Yeah, that’s right: cost of books, rent, that sort of stuff.’

‘I think we can help...’ said Price shuffling closer like a sharp toothed gharial on the banks of the Ganges. ‘I’m registered with the Office of Fair Trading. I’m on the Consumer Credit Public Register. By the way, I’ve got a licence and a certificate: did you see the logo on my door? How much are you after?’

The terms were thirty percentage points above Bank of England Base Rate. At first, Price didn’t seem to be interested in collateral.

‘As the Great Philosopher said, "Rules are for the guidance of the wise and blind obedience of the stupid.’

‘Which Great Philosopher was that?’

Price had not expected to be questioned. He hesitated long enough for a bead of sweat to drop from forehead to nose.

‘Er, Schumaker I think it was.’

‘Wasn’t he a racing driver?’

‘His brother.’

‘Oh.’

‘No,’ said Price, moving on, ‘we don’t have much in the way of bad debts. We use the personal touch. We have a very active credit-control department.’

Ruskin looked round. There was nobody else to be seen: it was obviously a back-office activity.

‘You’re not local, son, are you? I can hear the burr in your words.’

‘Cornwall.’ Ruskin explained his presence in Ribchester.

‘Your mother misses you I bet.’

‘Probably. I’m all she’s got. My dad’s dead you see.’

‘Mothers are so precious aren’t they? I always say you don’t need no security if there’s a mum about.By the way, is she the full owner of her property?’

‘Yes,’ Ruskin assured Price, thinking of the canvas tepee.

‘Cornwall, you say? The price of property there is bloody scandalous: you can’t get anything under a quarter of a million. Airy I imagine?’

‘Airy,’ confirmed Ruskin, only too aware of the draughts that sucked into the tent.

‘Sea views?’

‘To the north and the south.’

‘Blimey,’ exclaimed an impressed Price, seeing in his mind a cliff-top mansion perched on a rugged peninsula. He sniffed. ‘And would she be willing to help you out if, in the unlikely circumstances you were unable to repay any of the monies I were to advance you?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Guarantor?’

‘Yes, Garron Tor. You must know it,’ said Ruskin pleased to be reminded of home.

‘Cornwall. I think I’m planning to retire there. Could you get her to sign this piece of paper?’

‘It’s blank.’

‘Bloody printer ink cartridge! You try and save a little money avoiding the big brands and see what happens! I’ll fill in the details later. Oh yes, and the other thing, by the way: I need you to make me a friend on your Facebook page so we don’t lose touch: I’ll poke you now and then so you don’t forget me. You can pay me back out of your future earnings.’

That had been two summers and two tranches ago. Now he was more highly geared than a JCB digger. Ruskin didn’t need the Institute of Fiscal Studies to tell him that the growth of his borrowing was on a similar trajectory to that of the Latvian National Debt. And for all the spending and all the debt Ruskin had precious little to show for it. The money went on what he liked to describe as networking expenses, mostly in the pub. Complete destitution had only been avoided this year through the paid work-experience.

Something had to be done: he’d have to go and speak with Samson Price.

Get out of Lowestoft as quickly as you can and turn right onto drunken meandering English lanes held tight in margins of cow parsley with bright ox-eye daisies waving you forward. It’s surprising just how far you can get over the hours without really trying. The first night was spent on heathland surrounded by thick conifer forest, his sleep disturbed by a nightjar. It wasn’t quite light when he packed away his lightweight hammock. He sat on a log and ate the last of his food. Another day of cycling. No rush, enjoy the journey. Feel the fresh air, feel the sun on your face, feel the strength in your body. But you have to stop sometime unless you plan to cycle through the night, and for his second night under the stars Ruskin chose a quiet corner of woodland by a meadow rich with buttercups to unpack and unfurl his hammock. Across the field, a hare, ears amongst the grass, haunches in the air as it fed. Ruskin was tired. A bit of repellent to keep the mosquitoes away and he was asleep in a state of suspended levitation.

Sniffing, quiet panting.

Panting. Quiet sniffing.

Ruskin felt a wet nose where he would prefer a wet nose not to go. He opened his eyes. The vivid early brightness of another new summer day. Skylarks pushing high up into the sky and falling dangerously down again. And three enormous dogs lapping against his hammock, pushing, prodding, curious. He was rapidly much more awake.

‘This land is my land,’ came a woman’s voice. It was a voice used to giving commands, a voice used to being obeyed.

It’s not easy to elegantly disentangle from a hammock and Ruskin didn’t manage it, arriving on his feet after a bit of a stumble and a bit of a fall. The dogs surrounded him. God they were big - reaching well above his waist - graceful, streamlined, powerful, wiry - but with a softer, more straggly-haired underbelly. They were active but there was no barking, no growling – they were almost preternaturally silent.

‘Don’t worry about my dogs. They won’t attack - unless you’re a wolf that is. Those two with the ruff are Irish wolfhounds and the other is a Borzoi.’

‘He’s a bit stripy on top, that one,’ said Ruskin pointing at the Borzoi.

‘They call it brindle. Beautiful dogs.’

Ruskin tried to gauge the woman in front of him. She was dressed sensibly but well for the morning’s fresh air, and a bit younger than his mother, he reckoned, although he couldn’t actually remember how old his mother was. Here was a woman unafraid to confront a young male stranger although having three dogs that must have weighed in collectively at twice his own weight – probably helped. They could have run him down and squashed him into submission.

‘Anyway. This land is my land - from the California redwood over there to the New Mill island, from the conifer woodland to the New Mill waters – this land is my land.’

‘It’s God’s good earth.’ said Ruskin starting a defence.

‘Not in a Court of Law it’s not. I own the freehold and you’re trespassing.’

‘I slung my hammock here.’

‘I can see that. But you slung your hammock on my land, between my trees, above my grass.’

There was a bit off a stand-off as they took the measure of each other. She would have looked quite formidable even without the doggy bodyguard. Ruskin wondered how he came over to her; under the guise of stretching, he flexed a few muscles. No response. Ruskin blinked first.

‘I’ll be gone shortly. I’m cycling towards some work.’

The woman took this as an act of surrender. Gracious in victory, she offered a concession in return.

‘There’s work to be done here if you want. It can pay for your accommodation...’

Ruskin’s eyebrows signalled some surprise.

‘Can you drive a tractor?’ she asked.

‘I can.’

‘I’ve got a couple of fields that need mowing for the hay before the rain returns. Don’t worry, if you’re any good there’s quite a bit that needs doing and I’ll pay you by the hour. Any good with a chainsaw?’

‘I know how to use one.’

‘Good. When you’re properly dressed go through the gate over there. When you reach a drive, follow it down to the house. Go round the back to the farm outbuildings. Got it? I’ll get someone to find you something to eat before you start.’

Ruskin nodded.

‘You’re English?’

‘Cornish.’

‘Can’t be helped. Probably better than the English who can’t be arsed to get off their larded arses unless their arsing about after getting half-arsed.’

‘That’s a lot of arse.’

‘The buggers won’t work.’

It turned into a whole day’s work. First there was getting the tractor hitched up to the mower and throttling down to the fields and mowing. Then he drove over the cut rows pulling a hay bob to fluff up the grass to help drying. He was good at this, having helped out at plenty of farms back home, and it was satisfying work. It was good to be getting paid to be out in the sun too.

Somebody foreign put out an early lunch for him in the yard. Then it was ear muffs and eye protectors as he reduced a fallen tree and all its branches to manageable logs for the woman’s wood burning stove. He made a bonfire of the debris and let the wood-smoke fill his lungs and sting his eyes. It reminded him of growing-up.

‘I suppose you want cash,’ she said. It was gone five o’clock. He hadn’t seen her since the morning encounter, although the dogs had been racing around the fields all day. ‘Come round to the garden front. My goodness you smell.’

It was a big house, much more than a farmhouse. There was a swimming pool a little way removed from the house and kept from view by a laurel hedge. It looked new. She came out with some money and saw Ruskin looking longingly at the untroubled water.

‘Impressive isn’t it?’ she said. The dogs were at her side.

‘Can I use it? I’m all sweaty and smoky.’

‘No you bloody can’t. It’s a symbol of my wealth – along with the house, the horses and the land. It shows my position in the world relative to people like you.’

He looked at her. Was she joking? Possibly. Possibly not.

‘Capital accumulation is what it’s all about, followed by ostentatious consumption.’

‘And how have you accumulated so much?’

You do ask questions don’t you? Actually I run my own business – media, that sort of thing. Not only business. I married well and I divorced well too. Traded in the pooch for these dogs. Damn good deal.’

‘It’s a big place, for certain.’

‘And lots of staff. I employ lots of staff here. I’ve got a housekeeper and her daughter from Poland. A Romanian couple do most of the more manual jobs around the house and live in the lodge. The horses are looked after very well by some Bulgarians. I’m negotiating for an Estonian girl to play my piano at weekends for my guests. I provide bed and board and pay them what I need to – which isn’t very much. I only need you because my trusty Hungarian farm hand has had to go back home on family business. He’d probably have cut the meadows with a scythe. We’ve got the whole wide world here - except the English - and the place has never looked better.’

She carefully counted out some money.

‘Sign this chitty so I can claim you against tax. I’ve deducted five pounds for your accommodation last night.’

Ruskin said nothing. They hadn’t agreed on a rate. He in turn counted the money, acceptable for a day’s work for a student but not generous. He looked at the piece of paper: Received from Betty Burgess Enterprises. He signed.

‘You better get on your bike and on your way then.’

‘I thought I could...’

‘Well you thought wrong, didn’t you? It’s not good manners to outstay your welcome is it? Thank you for your work.’

He was dismissed. But he had more money in his pocket now so he wasn’t complaining. Not your regular sort of employer though. She saw him off her land. The two wolfhounds and the borzoi raced with Ruskin’s bike as he cycled away down an avenue of poplars.

Another day of cycling, of expanding his lungs and stretching his body back into full fitness, and at last, there on the horizon, the mighty tower of Ribchester cathedral, and somewhere behind it the Stoat and Ferret public house. Most called it just the Stoat; the Ferret seemed to have been lost in the trousers of time and this diminution was a sure way to distinguish the regular from the visitor, the local from the stranger. Getting closer now. Throw the bike against the wall and go in.

Behind the bar stood Rosie, short and plump, and topped with a battered, peroxide beehive of thinning white hair.

‘Amenlordhavemercy! It’s bloody Ruskin – he’s back with us again!’ squeaked Rosie in greeting. 'What's it to be my little chicken?' although she needn't have asked and was already filling a pint glass with Old Nats cider. Ah, Old Nats cider, a straw yellow liquid rendered opaque by a swirling suspension of unidentified solids on which Rosie weaned her regulars, a dangerous drink made on Plumian Farm from an ancient and secret blend of old English apple varieties. When Ruskin had first tried an evening with Old Nats, his faculties were so impaired he felt they would never recover: there had been double and intermittent triple vision, a prolonged singing sensation in the ears and his skin shone with a waxy sheen. It had been Rosie who insisted that Ruskin persist with his induction. After two pints, the world took on a Lake Baikal-like clarity. Four or more pints however and the corrosive qualities of rough cider took over, leading Ruskin to suspect that Old Nats contained active ingredients besides apples.

'You looking hot and flustered.’

‘I am.’

''Been courting?' she added.

'He's a bloody rutter is that Ruskin,' was heard from a grizzled regular down the bar,

and Rosie shrieked with laughter, like wailing.

‘To your health.’ she charged, placing the full glass on the bar.

‘Let us live while we live!’ came an affirming chorus from down inside the pub.

‘To your health,’ smiled Ruskin in complete agreement.

He had returned. He was back.

He looked around. It was a bare, L-shaped room with a sepia hue, a pub that the corporate brewers had over-looked or forgotten, a lost world of brown linoleum, brown painted woodwork, with walls and ceiling stained by dangerous levels of smoke, nicotine and improper language. The shorter segment in which Ruskin now stood contained little except one cast iron table, two chairs and a dart board, while the longer of the two was furnished with an upholstered settle running the length of the room, and flimsy wooden chairs. Posh it wasn't, a watering hole with low prices and a marginalized clientele.

Rosie has been landlady of the Stoat & Ferret for the past thirty-seven years, ever since her father - the previous landlord - had died. No doubt his father in turn had been landlord here. It seemed that in Ribchester, a licence to sell intoxicating liquor could be passed down the generations, without reference to magistrate or police report. Rosie's exact age was a mystery but clearly she would have qualified, had she required them, for extra government help with winter heating bills, replacement hips and a warden-controlled flatlet. Bugger all that. During opening times Rosie stood behind the narrow bar, greeted customers, poured pints, rinsed glasses and, with the authority of the Pope, passed judgement on the ways of Ribchester and the world - a narrow world to be sure, one gleaned from customers in general, but