Read I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History for Free Online

the shadows lengthened. After polishing off the last of their hidden Lucozade stash – it's Glucose Galore! in this part of the Forest of Dean – the extras drove home into the sunset, followed by the hotel-bound Australians; the presenter's unfulfilled desire to churn butter on camera meant the latter group would be back in the morning. To my mild unease, the exodus was promptly swelled by the departure of Dai, who rumbled away in his Vauxhall-badged mobile foundry as soon as Wayne turned up and paid him. When Cinderbury's beleaguered owner trudged off to his own car I felt a more powerful twinge of insecurity, which persisted until he trudged back out of the twilight bearing a mighty flagon of local scrumpy.
    The contempt I'd been nurturing for Wayne's shambolic stewardship melted into pity as we sat by the campfire and worked our way through this 7.5 per cent curse of the rustics, and a stash of combustible building materials I'd found round the back. It all came out. He'd acquired Cinderbury the summer before as an escape from that debilitating split existence, desperate for gainful employment that didn't demand his absence from the family home for half the year. But visitor numbers, already modest, had dwindled further when the nearby Clearwell Caves attraction launched their own 'spoiler' Iron Age settlement. 'It was made out of fibreglass,' said Wayne vacantly, 'but no one complained.'
    The reason they hadn't, as he saw it, was that no one really cared about the Iron Age one way or the other. 'It's just not . . . sexy. No shiny uniforms, no big war machines, sod all in the way of art and culture.' At last his blank face furrowed. 'Eight hundred years of nothing.'
    Beyond an astonishing level of disillusionment, the Cinderbury jinx had also caused Wayne untold sleepless nights, ratcheting debt and reacquaintance with a nicotine habit that had lain fallow for a decade. Yet he hadn't quite surrendered. There were plans to promote the village as a music venue, to hire it out to live-action role-players and new-age spiritualists. The school-party visits had gone fairly well – 'kids are great, really easy to please'. And then there were the half-dozen weekend guests who I learned were to arrive the following afternoon: the first such intake under his ownership.
    It seemed no stone would be left unturned in Wayne's quest for profitability – quite literally so with regard to the Roman villa whose foundations lay just behind the mobile-phone mast. 'Archaeology students excavating their own Roman ruin, and staying in an Iron Age roundhouse while doing it . . .' He aimed a rare smile into the fire. 'Imagine what the American universities would pay for that.' With difficulty I forced out a small hum of encouragement, thereby inspiring Wayne to reveal the triumphant zenith of this extraordinary proposal: the roadside stall where everything that was dug up would be flogged off.
    Certain it was only a matter of time and scrumpy before Wayne dragooned me into some 'What the Blacksmith Saw' period peep show, I greeted his departure with quiet relief. And the noisier sort, once noting that he'd thoughtfully left me the considerable balance of our gallon of peasant's ruin. Yes, I was going to make a one-man Iron-Age night out of it: just me, the starlit sky, the roaring fire. Oh, and this diseased sheep here.
    The feral quartet of flyblown woollybacks I'd regularly encountered outside the Cinderbury walls were survivors of a flock of authentic ancient breeds brought in by the village's creators. The rest, I gathered, had long since been sacrificed to provide the original owners with something appropriate to eat, and their roundhouse guests with something appropriate to sleep on. Considering this as I chivvied my grubby, unkempt guest back out through the entrance and blocked it up with the pallet provided, I felt a pang of compassion. This swiftly evolved into an adrenaline surge of alarm when, not yet halfway back to the fire, I