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wheeled round to investigate the source of a sudden clackety stampede. In the fire-lit gloaming I found myself face to blank-eyed face with the same animal, as in the dim background his three associates trampled clumsily in over the upended makeshift gate.
    Four sheep, I recognised immediately, were many more than four times as unsettling as one sheep. One was a sorry, stupid object of sympathy. Four was a gang. I knew it, they knew it, and most significantly they knew that I knew it. I took a pace towards them and they stood their ground; I essayed a threatening bark and they fanned out into a four-square, head-on attack formation. The effect was compounded by their neglected disfigurement. Strips of filthy, matted fleece sloughed off unshorn flanks imparted a look of haunted, mutant decay that connected powerfully with the childhood nightmares I'd suffered after reading an illustrated magazine account of wartime anthrax experiments.
    What had possessed these creatures to act with a fearless, focused determination so far beyond the feeble capabilities of their species? The only herbivorous sustenance within these walls had been strimmed down to a parched stubble, and on such a balmy night they could not be wanting for warmth. Had these leprous, forsaken animals come in search of companionship? I had only to picture myself amongst them to know they had not. The proffered hand, the playful nuzzle, then a nudge, the nudge trumped with a butt, another, two more, then a stamp and a Buckaroo back-kick, and as I went down the first probing nips and gnashes . . . Backing slowly away from their ghastly yellow gaze I understood what had impelled them here. Before them stood a man who had taken his ease upon the flayed hides of their colleagues, and must now face vengeance.
    What, I speculated frantically, would my Iron Age self have done? The question was no sooner asked than answered. Teenage memories of a Paleolithic-set film entitled Quest for Fire flooded my brain, and filtering through the depressing bulk that centred on muddy nudes being pleasured from behind, I recalled that the primeval obsession with flickering redness was less about warmth and cooking than warding off predators. With this in mind I retreated briskly to the fire, snatched up a blazing length of four by two, and, before allowing myself to wonder how it had come to this, charged at the invaders, a ragged, warrior death-yell shredding the warm, black air.
    Their unhurried withdrawal was half-hearted, even patronising. My cloven-hoofed tormentors ambled blandly out through the gate, passing en route the information board reminding visitors that the modest fortifications which encircled settlements such as Cinderbury were there not to deter human assault – generally benign co-existence was one facet of those '800 years of nothing' – but to keep destructive wildlife at bay. It wasn't a good time to remember a film extra's excitable account of the boar he'd spent many nights trying to hunt down through these very woods: 'Half the size of a donkey, nine-inch tusks – if he comes at you, it's all over.' Bar the awful, pleading screams.
    Working fast, I resurrected the pallet-gate, bracing it with four spear-poles, jammed obliquely into the sun-hardened earth. Bed now seemed sensible, but pausing at the roundhouse's grim, black portal, I understood this was not an option. Instead, I walked very quickly back to the fire, pausing to sweep up a great armful of the only fuel to hand within my shrinking radius of fear: the stack of wooden tiles reserved to display visiting school parties' attempts at period pottery.
    In the re-enactments that lay ahead I would become well acquainted with man's spiritual bond to fire, but never again would I feel it so intimately. Hunched up on a log, I didn't so much gaze at the flames as stare into them with a kind of desperate intensity. Be gone my scrumpy, my Clarks, my Fiat Punto – here, blazing savagely before me, was the