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We’d woken the farm dogs up, though. Howling and hollering, they were down in a dip from where a solitary light glowed. It was after one in the morning, and there was nothing we could do but march down there and hope that Woody’s protection against the folk of the spiritual realm would work too on the creatures of the distinctly physical one. By the time we reached the farm yard, the noise was tumultuous. A light snapped on in an upstairs window of the farmhouse, and a woman threw open the glass.

‘Who’s there?’ she shrieked. The dogs went even crazier at the tone of her voice. We transmogrified in an instant from pagan subversives into the nicest middle-class boys you’d ever introduce to your mum.

‘Oh, hello there,’ said Woody, all but doffing his hat. ‘Really sorry to disturb you, gosh it’s late, but we got, er, well, we got a bit lost on the moor. Sorry.’

Silence. I mumbled a sorry or two in support.

‘Er, could you possibly point us in the direction of Peter Tavy?’ Not a strapping local who’d come and rescue us, but the name of the nearest village gleaned from the map.

‘Down that lane. Keep going.’

The window crashed shut on yet more apologies from us, setting the dogs off again. We ran from the farm yard.

The last bit of the walk, along satisfyingly solid country lanes under a canopy of stars, was beautiful. Even the moon was finally getting its act together by rising high enough into the sky to help us see. There was the small problem that my car was still five or six miles away, and there was no way Woody, whose feet were in agony from knackered boots, could walk that far. We decided that, as soon as one of us had a phone signal, we’d try and find a taxi to take us back to the car.

We shape-shifted for the second time in an hour when the taxi from Tavistock finally caught up with us back on the main A386. Having gone from nomadic rebels to impeccable Cedrics at the farm, we further metamorphosed into swooning Edwardian ladies in the company of the chatty taxi driver. ‘You’re our knight in shining armour!’ we trilled, which he seemed to rather like. He was entirely unfazed to be picking up two idiots who’d ‘got a bit lost on the moor’ at two in the morning: ‘Seen it all in this job,’ he said, grinning at us. He told us of folk in T-shirts and flip-flops who ask to be dropped in the middle of the moor ‘’cos they fancy a walk’. ‘Not in that outfit, I won’t,’ is his standard, schoolmarmish reply. How the Edwardian ladies tittered!

Actually, we were probably near clinical hysteria. It had been the most trying walk I think I’ve ever done, and that was on a warm summer’s evening carrying nothing more than a map, some water and a few Kit Kats. I tried to imagine what dragging a 15-stone corpse the same way would have been like, on a howling winter’s day perhaps. Strung from a bier, the sack of dead flesh swinging in the wind as your back ached and feet froze in the gloop. Perhaps some people used a cart, and spent large parts of the awful journey alternately tugging the wheels out of the hungry mud and bouncing them over sharp rocks. People must have died making that journey. Would church rules, condemning people to this torture for no good reason save for their own sense of divine right, allow that the new body be let in to the graveyard with the old? Or would the poor, broken bastards be forced to do it all again next week?

Not much better than the idiots in flip-flops, I had seriously underestimated the moor. It had seemed impossible that somewhere so savage could sit at the heart of Devon, that lush landscape of cattle and clotted cream. Snobbery played an inglorious part too: my devotion to Wales, taken to new heights (and depths) from a decade of living there, had produced a sour little assumption that there was nowhere truly wild left in England. England’s little piskies had the last laugh on that one.

The northern equivalent of the word ‘lich’ is ‘lyke’, and reading that, a distant recollection