Single lives like spent matches, their presence a flame.

Guano streaks down the rock face as birds drip off the sheer cliff and wind round the air in black and white semicircles. This is an image of a valley, a vista. In the centre of a rolling sweep of rounded mountains, two chunks of granite jerk, slab sided, out of the flat valley floor. The prehistoric shapes of cormorants fly above me, heading down for their fish supper. But first they must traverse, over road and river. Drifting like the clouds over sugarlump caravans and broccoli trees they swoop out to the sea, 5 miles hence. Waves crash no longer against this granite nest, it faces only the ripples of a sea of wheat. The water left 8000 years ago; the valley now drained and settled, only the seabirds remain.