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the help of Nigel Clark. We interviewed people who grew up in Avebury during the 1930s, including Josie Ovens, the Rawlins brothers (whose father ran the local garage and provided electric power to the village), Heather Peak-Garland, and her sister the late Jane Lees. But I would most particularly like to thank Ros Cleal, the curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum, and her colleagues at the National Trust in Avebury. They put up with my many visits to the Keiller Archive there, and generously shared their experiences of working at the World Heritage Site, as well as their chocolate biscuits. I enjoyed many enlightening conversations on such diverse matters as the sexual dimorphism of aurochs, the law pertaining to the excavation of badger setts, and the politics of keeping human skeletons in museums. Again, everything I have right is down to them, whereas everything wrong (sometimes deliberately so) is my fault alone.

They found me volunteer work so that I could experience at first hand bumping along muddy tracks in a National Trust Land Rover with head estate warden Hilary Makins, and clearing about three hundred spent tea-lights and a muddy ground sheet from the West Kennet Long Barrow. (What do people get up to there?) I checked the first-aid kits, sat at the till in the Barn Museum with Chris Penney, and worked behind the counter at the caf, so that I can now make a mean cappuccino. Terry the Druid Keeper of the Stones allowed me to join a ceremony to celebrate Imbolc in the Circle, at which he and Gordon Rimes gave me a glimpse of Druid and Wiccan beliefs. The following year I rose excruciatingly early to drive to Avebury for summer solstice sunrise, only to find there was nowhere within miles of the village to park, and no sun. In the strange way that life has of imitating fiction, I picked up my first Neolithic arrowhead, and saw my first hare in the wild, while walking near the village shortly after I had written both experiences into the novel. I stayed twice at Fishlocks Cottage, and once at Teachers Cottage, in order to soak up the atmosphere of Avebury after hours, when most of the visitors have gone home. It is truly magical to sit with a glass of wine in the garden at Fishlocks, watching a September sunset and dodging bats on their way to cruise the ditches.

Thanks to the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury for permission to quote from Keiller’s letters. (The only fictional quote is the letter of condolence to Frannie.) For further reading on Keiller, I’d recommend A Zest for Life, Lynda J. Murray’s biography. For the archaeology of Avebury and Neolithic/Bronze Age monuments, Josh Pollard’s Avebury was immensely useful, as well as Mike Pitts’s Hengeworld, and Aubrey Burl’s Prehistoric Avebury. Brian Edwards has written a number of papers on the social history of the village, and Marjorie Rawlins’s memoir, Butcher, Baker, Saddlemaker, provided details of life in Avebury in the early part of the twentieth century. On pagan belief, historian Ronald Hutton is the author of many erudite books, including The Triumph of the Moon. I also found helpful The Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner, and Pagan Paths by Pete Jennings. Andy Worthington’s Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion is a fascinating account of the background to the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s. I did have a few moments myself in the seventies, but for what it was like to be there in the eighties, Bee D avies was very helpful. The autobiographies of two Second World War night-fighter navigators, Lewis Brandon and Jimmy Rawnsley, provided background for Davey’s experiences in the RAF.

My father, Robert Mills, was an RAF navigator, and during the war drove a Baby Austin with a sheet of steel welded to the roof. My mother, Sheila Mills, spent the war years working in the almoner’s office of a large hospital, and, during our last conversations, she provided many details of daily life in the 1930s and 1940s. This book was written during a dark and unhappy period for me, as it was conceived at the time of her long illness and eventual death. I