A puncture on a raw January afternoon. Why did I cycle off the tar road? Hawthorn-lined bridleways running down hills are asking for trouble. All round stretched an empty, curiously lonely country; the rooks tumbling about a rocky outcrop seemed to mock; trapped in a culvert, a spating burn roared. An hour’s fumbling with spanner and pump before I was off again. Grudgingly the landscape yielded a church. I wheeled the bike up the path. Like so many before me, I paused to read the gravestones. The names, men and women dead this century and a half, conjured up a world as physical and immediate as the fields surrounding them. “In loving memory of Thomas Trenholme” read one farmer’s memorial. Tren is Norse for crane; when surnames were fixed for the medieval poll tax,