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Paul Devereux wasn’t wrong, though. The path was a sod to follow, especially in dwindling light. Even the moon wasn’t playing ball. Having risen so spectacularly, it failed to climb high and bright, preferring instead to limp along just above the horizon, the colour of ripe cheese. At times, there was no evidence of a route at all, and all we could do was work out from the map what we were vaguely aiming for and to head as best as possible in that direction. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t even brought a compass. Though I had remembered my little wind-up torch, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself for that. All the same, we were breaking the cardinal rule of not straying from the corpse road, and I couldn’t imagine that it had ever been any different for anyone else.

Occasionally, we would stumble across the Lich Way again, whether as a gravel or grass path, a rough stone cobble, or as a sudden and unexpected little holloway through the featureless sump. It was as clear as day when we were back on the path, you could just feel it. As I found on the Tóchar Phádraig, there was an echoing, bony quality to it, the sound of centuries of human and animal feet booming deep and resonant beneath us. It swam in and out of focus like a distant radio signal, but when it was on, it was very on. And when it was off, we floundered hopelessly. The folk, I was told, were largely leaving us alone. They had long ago surrendered authority on this ribbon of humanity across their moor, for this, Woody felt, had been a human ceremonial way long before the Church muscled in.

He did confess an encounter later on, though, one that I’m very glad he didn’t divulge at the time. At one of the bleakest bits in the middle of the moor, when we’d lost the route again and were inching like snails across the squelchy savannah, Woody tells me that the spirit of a dead man, big and hairy, wearing hessian, with mad eyes and a matted beard, suddenly appeared at our side. He wasn’t in a good mood either, forever denied the sanctuary of church on account of being a murderer and condemned to spend eternity on the Lich Way. ‘You can take me out with you,’ he told Woody, who pointed out that he couldn’t, as he was protected. ‘He’s not, though,’ said the hirsute murderer, pointing at me, at which point Woody silently threw some protection my way.

Something got through, however, because as we became increasingly lost, and the moon continued to glimmer dimly only just above the horizon, I began to feel really ill. I’d massively overheated earlier, and that nearly always brings on a migraine. And so it was again. It felt as if the jolt of every step were bruising my eyeballs from the inside, and I could barely focus. The map under torchlight swam uselessly in my gaze, all identifying landscape features invisible in the black. I had to stop; the pain was excruciating.

Often, a physical purge helps release the pressure a little, and I was soon retching into the black. My head still pounded, and all I could think of to do was to place it, forehead-first, on the cool grass, and hope that it would absorb some of the heat and pain. Woody later told me that this moment, as I sank to the ground with a moan, was his low-point of the night (amongst some pretty stiff competition), as he wasn’t too sure that I’d ever get up again. He put his hands on my head and declared that there was a flint from the folk lodged in my forehead; I’d been attacked. He helped dispel it, and I felt a little better, just about able to continue on our hopeless way.

A long drawn-out hour or two later, the remains of the headache vanished in an instant, at the precise moment when we scrambled over a dry stone wall into a farmer’s field. Even if we were miles out of our way (and we were), we had reached the other side of the moor. Relief flooded my body, and the pain just evaporated. I have never had such a strong, and instant, physical recovery from so far down. The dry stone wall, and even the barbed wire that