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John across the top of the ridge. He wears a ragged shirt and tie under an old tweed jacket, as if he left the house in his Sunday best and dragged himself through a thicket. It is Owen Mór, who owns the land adjacent to Dulough.
    The old farmer is trespassing, and John wonders how often he passes from his own land onto theirs. He is watching the bottom of the valley. When John looks in the same direction, he sees the moving lorry winding its way up the avenue towards the house. It’s followed by a small white van. He glances at his watch; they’re late. Still, it has given him time to get well out of the way. When he looks up again, Owen Mór is staring directly at him. His face hasn’t changed from when he thought he was alone; his mouth is a thin, lipless line almost hidden by a white half-grown beard. Some sort of sheepdog-collie mix limps up behind him, as expressionless as his owner.
    “Having some work done?” Owen Mór says, as soon as the men are close enough to hear each other above the wind. He does not seem at all embarrassed being caught on someone else’s land. John looks down at the house, but the lorry and the van have disappeared into the trees at the end of the avenue. It is easiest to say yes, but as soon as he does, Owen Mór’s lips bend into a half smile. He should have remembered that the old farmer is thick with Frank Foyle, the local county councillor in charge of turning Dulough into a tourist attraction. Owen Mór seems to recognize this knowledge in John and tries again. “That’ll be the movers, then?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    If Owen Mór is wondering what John is doing all the way up here, he doesn’t mention it. “Nice morning, so it is.”
    He turns away and walks on across the top of the ridge in the direction of the sea. John watches him disappear over the hill. He climbs the few more steps it takes to get to the top, the knife-edge of the ridge, which the older man had taken like a mountain goat a few moments before. John hasn’t been up here in years, since before the children were born, perhaps, and he is surprised to discover that he is more afraid than he was as a younger man—that the possibility of falling now seems quite real.
    He sees the land around him as if he were on a plane. The world outside Dulough is a series of messy fields, Lough Power a vast green pool in the distance. Green, not black; it is much shallower than John’s own lake. The English artist Edward Steele lives at Lough Power now, finally having claimed his great-grandfather’s house after it had been left uninhabited for so long. Unlike his ancestor Geoffrey Roe, who was a painter, Steele works in wood and metal. He has placed sculptures in the shallow waters of the lough, a hollow dolphin and a larger-than-life salmon. John has always meant to ask if he could bring Kate and Philip to see the iron fish in the water.
    It is still early in the morning and he knows that the movers are likely to be around all day. He is cold; he has had nothing to eat. But he’s well used to walking, and his legs keep moving whether he wills them to or not. He follows the top of the ridge north, away from the sea, naming the geographical features as he walks; he is trying not to think about the blister forming on his right heel. He should have worn yesterday’s socks; they would have been better than nothing.
    When he reaches the cirque at the end of the valley, he scrambles down to the bottom and pulls off his shoe; one heel is soaked with blood. He lowers his foot into a tea-colored pool, the top layer warmed by the sun, and lies back on the rock, keeping his foot in the water, making a comfortable bed on the moss with his jacket. The house, the cottages, the moving men, even Owen Mór, disappear from view; he is completely encased in mountain. He remembers hiding up here late one summer, on a morning when he was due to return to boarding school, when the thought of the place made him sick. It had taken them hours