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elevated mound in the heart of a royal hunting forest. Hoary old oaks shoot up shoulder-to-shoulder, sprouting dense canopies that turn the ground black with shade. Matted blackthorn, bramble and hazel unravel and twist in impenetrable lattices. Down through the woods, the Nidd licks at swooping branches of willow and alder. Heath and fern spring from its slopes; birch, holly, rowan and yellow-flowering gorse conceal fox, wolf, boar, grouse and deer. Huntsmen are here. They cut swathes through the virgin wood to the east using the edge-land’s undulations and beck valleys filled with wild garlic to hide their human outline and cowl scent. I see all of this in a second and then, with a changing breeze, I am left with the glinting fields, pylons and the bare tunnel of the holloway again. The hunting tracks reform into Bilton’s cul-de-sacs and estate roads – Meadowcroft, Tennyson Avenue, Knox Chase, Bilton Chase – the word ‘chase’ being the only indication of what came before. A young oak marooned in the centre of a farmer’s field stands like a lost child after some natural disaster. When I get home a note in my book reads:
I love this place. It’s the best place I’ve ever been.
Next to it is the scribbled drawing of the fox. I don’t remember doing either of them.
    I rattle around our Victorian terrace. I gloss cupboards, strip and coat walls and wonder at the histories I’m exposing and covering up. Where was the nail made that hammered in these floorboards? Whose were the hands that wore these ebony cupboard handles smooth? What did the mute, paint-splattered servants’ bell by the bed sound like? Ghosts are filling the emptiness. These worlds of the dead and the living. Occasionally my mind drifts and I hear what sounds like the footfall of children running about upstairs or I’ll turn and the half-light and my tired eyes conjure the shadow of a woman, hunched and carrying coal to the stove. I cook, eat dinner and call Rosie.
I wish you were here.
When she does return, fleetingly, she is exhausted from travelling and we are granted an all-too-brief window to fall back into our happy, human patterns. As each weekend draws to a close we take to bed like one of us is leaving for war, pained by separation and seeking comfort. After she leaves I rise early and run to the crossing point before the world stirs. Passing the empty, spectral forms of buses on one dark morning, I read
2B: Bilton
glowing on their LED destination boards. ‘To be’ indeed. I’m surrendering to the edge-land, and it to me. My time is determined by the dusk and the dawn, by these fleeting moments of suspension between day and night when I feel most fully and wildly alive.
    Another heatless, open-sky morning. I see no one, not even the buttoned-up mirages of dog walkers on the old railway in the early mist, driven from warm beds by the bowel habits of their pets. The meadow’s grass is brittle, covered in a fine white dust and fresh with fox prints. They lead off in a trail so easy to follow it’s as though there is something he wants me to see, something beyond the old railway and the mills, past the histories of huntsmen and the deer herds.
    The last of the cathedral-deep glaciers melted here 11,000 years ago, but today ice sculpts the edge-land again. Trees are black lines scratched in blue and the air smells of wet, cold iron. White mountains of cloud are indistinct from the hill-line. Pylons twinkle top to bottom like vast river icicles. I hear the quiet waves of cars stirring on the main roads and see the moving chrome and glass shine in the distance like wet stone. There is a sacred calm and I imagine I am at this land’s beginning, that very moment thousands of years ago when the great ice finally cracked and shrank back further north. I shut my eyes and let the sound of traffic morph into that of a flood river, breaking out from the glacier along a path of least