It was early morning. The sun had risen, but autumn mist still lingered in the valleys of the broken landscape to the south and west of Ludd"s Castle. To the east, the wide tract of open moorland was beginning to change, the greys and dull browns of first light vanishing, as if retreating into the earth, to be replaced by the green of mosses, the ochres of lichen and the purple of flowering ling. The lights in the cottage windows of Stone Clough village went out one by one as the sunlight increased. To the north, in the direction of Pen Crags, the rocky slopes were still shrouded in darkness.
Ray and Martin measured the interior of the ringfort with a fifty-metre tape, Ray writing the figures in his police notebook.
"Are you noticing anything?" Ray asked.
Martin shrugged. "What is there
