Raising his eyes from the map to scan this indistinct coastline he saw a few places where the old bones of the earth almost poked out, knuckle-like, through the flesh spread over them by the rivers. The Shive, which lay a mile off the high-tide line of the Isle of Grain, was one of those. It even had its own system of pools and bars, echoing the greater system of which it was a part. Daniel guessed that some daft person had long ago seen fit to convey stones out to this stony Hazard and pile them up, making a cairn from which to watch for Vikings or light signal-fires, and later generations of the daft had used it as the foundations of a permanent tower.