This is a story of landscape and community, a way of life descended from Anglo-Saxon and Viking farmers. It is a story that could belong to anyone who has lived their early years growing up on a modest dairy farm. It is about static lives, but also about movement and change, about understanding how the past walks through us, mapping our present and future.


Whilst the present is a winding road that has taken me through the Middle East and back into Swaledale, I carry my early years spent in a little country. A little country that no longer exists in the form it once did - except, that is, in every fibre of me.