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map and then drew a few lines on the survey.
    In this way, dispensing with the compass and doing everything by eye, he proceeded by fits and starts across the field until half an hour later, checking his position with bearings all around him, he seemed satisfied. He took off his backpack and placed it on the ground where the slanting sun caught it and made it nicely visible. The spot was within two feet of where Imbolc and Stort had met.
    Arthur Foale then squatted on the ground and peered along it this way and that, like a golfer looking at the lie of a green before making an important putt. What he was doing was not dissimilar. He was looking at slight variations in the ground brought out as shadows by the sun.
    Finally satisfied, he moved the backpack a few yards downhill and to one side, where the stream that came from the hill above flowed near where Imbolc had first arrived. He then climbed up the hill with vigour and some excitement, not looking back until he was two hundred yards away and perhaps fifty feet higher.
    He looked back downslope to his pack, searching out again the variations in height he had made out earlier. He took some time doing this, so long in fact that the sun rose further and the shadows disappeared.
    But he had seen enough and seemed well satisfied.
    He pulled out his mobile and made a call home.
    His wife Margaret answered.
    ‘It fits,’ he said. ‘If I’m right, this is where Beornamund did his work. I . . .’
    He said no more.
    A fickle wind had twisted and turned across the face of the hill and strands of mist risen from the bed of the stream and briefly obscured the site he was looking at. With the coming of the mist his signal was gone.
    But that did not really surprise him. The geophysical survey and the difficulty he had found in taking bearings had prepared him for anything.
    The site was the strangest he had ever known in a career of busy and often controversial archaeology.
    Compasses went wild. Mobiles cut out. And the geophysical survey he had privately commissioned and which he now held in his hand showed absolutely no results of any kind at all in a wide circle around the spot where he had first placed the backpack. It was a bizarre white-out. Which was a first in his career and theoretically impossible, because there is always variation in the Earth and the only thing that could wipe the slate clean was a source of power so great that nothing quite like it had ever been found before.
    The mist’s brief return was over and the sun shone again but it was higher now, the shadows gone.
    His mobile rang.
    ‘Are you sure ?’ asked his wife, who was Professor Foale too, but unlike him still in gainful employment. Her subject was Anglo-Saxon literature and her speciality the most extraordinary legend to emerge out of the Dark Ages. It concerned Beornamund, greatest of the Mercian CraftLords, who had given his name to the great manufacturing city of Birmingham or Beornamund’s Ham, which some dialects, now lost, were known to have corrupted to Brummagem or Brum.
    ‘Arthur, can you hear me?’
    Arthur Foale stood transfixed by the singular beauty that morning of the light across the hill and it made him think of the two objects for which Beornamund was most famous, both now lost.
    ‘ Arthur? ’
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m here but . . . give me a moment. I’m thinking.’
    ‘Thinking of what?’ demanded Margaret finally.
    ‘I am thinking that this is a site that should not be desecrated by excavation,’ he replied, as astonished by this strange impulse as she was. Excavation was what he did. Otherwise how was he going to unearth the story the site might tell?
    ‘I’ll have to find some other way of exploring its secrets,’ he said rather lamely.
    ‘Such as?’ Margaret wondered.
    Arthur’s methods could be unusual. Very unusual. They tended to get him into trouble.
    ‘I’m looking at my shadow on the hill, the sun being bright here this morning,’ he replied for no