The mist lay thick over the fields; not a single bird cheeped. I walked down the village to where a new sewage pipeline is being laid. A few weeks before Christmas, a JCB uncovered some Neolithic arrowheads and tools by the little beck running here. Evidently this was the site of a Stone Age village.

As the beck chattered loudly with recent rain, I stared into the deep misty murk where the discoveries had been made and imagined what it must have been like to stand here 6,000 years ago.