Return to the Hill follows four primary characters who have grown up in a Somerset village at the start of the Twentieth Century, and have been changed by experiences of loss and diminution during WW1, find their way in life elsewhere. It joins them in 1935 when Alice has become a lady's maid in London and Dorothy a nanny in Scotland, while their brothers remain in the village to farm. Their lives are changed again with the outbreak of WW2. Dorothy returns home to nurse her sick mother and take care of her father and brothers. Having given her life to the service of others, in her forties, she falls in love with an unlikely man and begins a new and exciting chapter in her life.