4: Craig Dun
T
he
great chalk hill stood above the village. At the Spring festival, with the grey-fleeced sheep grazing on its slopes, it seemed kind and smiling. But when the dark time came, after the burning of the straw to keep away the snow, the hill seemed to glower down, asking for sacrifice. Then it was not kind. It was a hunched monster that held the frightened village in its hand. Then the folk of Craig Dun cowered over the hearth-place, shivering in the smoke, speaking the charms against evil that they had learned from their fathers and their fathers before them, hoping to drive away the horrors of the hill.
There were forty houses under the hill. Their walls of stout flint, brought up from the flint-shaft in the hill’s bowels; their roofs of ashwood and thatch. Go down the t
