i. Here’s the place on the road where you stop: stop to breathe and to look, to stand on the square of the tower and see the circle of the world spin round you – the dips and hollows of the moors and fells, the rivers travelling out towards the sea where they’ll open up their palms and spill handfuls of silver onto the flat plate of the bay. Pale grass in the fields sways in the wind. The sky blows over you. Some days you can see as far as Wales. Twelve hundred years before the tower was built they stopped here on the track, laid down a boat-shaped coffin hollowed from an oak tree. This was where they buried it: this high place of wind and sun, light and water, where the dead could watch the whole world, and the living, stop and breathe – Elizabeth Burns ii. iii. iv. |