Nick Davies

It was late one Sunday evening last summer. The stumps had long since been drawn from the cricket pitch, all the spectators and picnickers had gone home and only a few of the village men still remained, leaning on the bar of the club house with their cans of Guinness bitter and packets of B and H, and, more or less as an afterthought, the talk turned to the new road. For five or ten minutes, they just knocked it around gently – how much noise would there be, how much smell, was it true that Bob and Jean on the edge of the village would be able to touch the trucks going by from the end of their garden?

Up on the great green mound, high over the valley and the plains that sweep down towards the sea, it seems as if in the whole world, there are only two sounds. There is the wind rummaging in the grass just as it has done every day for as long as the land has been here, and there is the beast.