Lady Mary's Walk

In time they reached a huge boulder, trebucheted into this alien place four hundred millennia before, fat and blackened on one side by generations of wood fire, where the youngsters of Crieff, free from the prying eyes of their elders, cooked picnics and sang and danced through the night and dreamed of living forever and loving forever and – some of them at least – of leaving forever.

They arrived at a broad avenue of beeches. Behind it, running parallel, was the ghost of the railway line. The trees lined it in glory, their moult of leaves, year-fall upon year-fall, accumulating beneath them, reducing, returning, powdering into dust. Each tree was inscribed with the names or initials of countless lovers and newborns, recorded over decades, carved in love and happiness and hope, every chiselled token an isolated attempt at immortality. Domesday Crieff. People born and people dead, lives lived, lives lost, histories now extant only in the barks of these familiars.

The avenue extended for a mile before the path narrowed again, bounded either side by the river and a retaining wall of the railway. Curve of the bank. Silver glide of the river. The path tracked upwards. Ahead was a tunnel beneath the old railway line with graffiti-lined walls and the odour of piss and staleness. Granite slabs interlocked, some small, some huge, flecked white with mould, grown green with moss. Twenty yards further on, mostly obscured by a stand of silver birch, was a set of ruins. Stone shell, long succumbed, window and doorway revealed in relief, chimney breast rising into nothing.