The Bounds

Braunton, 1798. A parish walks its bounds. A stone has moved in the night. And the only man who knew where it stood is dead. Every spring at Rogationtide the parish of Braunton walks its boundaries, stone by stone, and bumps its boys on every one so they will remember where Braunton ends. This year the surveyor Angharad Pryce walks with them, chain on her shoulder, to settle a quarrel over the strips of the Great Field. Old Simon Hartnoll leads the way, as he has for nearly fifty years. He is the only man alive who knows where the stones in the Burrows stand, because the sand buries them every winter. On the second morning the procession comes over the dunes to the eleventh stone. It has moved twenty yards in the night. In the hollow beside it lies Simon, with his coat turned inside out. The parish says he was pixy-led. Angharad has seen his hands, and knows he could never have turned a coat himself. The third of the Field-Book Mysteries, following Where the Foxgloves Grow and The Harvest Jug: an atmospheric Georgian mystery of open fields, shifting sand, old rhymes and a woman who will not take the parish's word for anything she can measure herself.