The car trip to the Brough of Birsay led me through treeless landscapes, shy and soft in the sunshine, and filled with the bright smiles of wildflowers, a poem in white, rose, purple and green, laid down as scenery by a benevolent god.

I stood beside them, with the wind in my face, trying to remember an older time, as if I’d been there before. But maybe those were your memories, Fiona, not mine. Maybe that’s what the stones are for, repositories of memories, remembering the fingers of all who had touched them.

I was looking for an excuse to go to the other side of the island, and it was interesting to learn your family tree had spread some of its roots there.

The ancient burial customs of this place exercise a strange fascination on me, like a spell cast centuries before I was born.