All life has fled the valley, the very rabbit-holes are derelict. Summer has silenced the river. No children play. Those left pass like ghosts or crowd the empty hearth where fowl or ailing lamb once stirred near the reddened sods. Sorrow folds like an empty sack as tears waste down death's cheek.
Night spreads a shroud.
There where the brambles curve in crazy hoops and giant ferns keel over into their graves, the September sun discovers the tumbled stones- fragmented grammar of a hidden landscape. Levered boulders at the base, the dry-stone walls curve over the heathery slope. Neither hunger nor fever could still the 'proverbial gaiety of the people'. The land was a stolen coat hired out in scraps and pieces. Landlords and agents rattled their boxes in the face of the poor who stretched out on the floor, took turns on the stool and fed from the pot- their only gold the stinking heap at the door.