Extract taken from Gallow Falls
By Alex Nye
Published by Fledgling Press

Laura has marked out the area for inspection. She’s excited to see what will reveal itself. She has metal pegs pinned into the ground, and string stretched taut. She knows what she is looking for. At least, she thinks she does.

Around her the trees gather silently like ghostly witnesses. She has to kneel, and it makes her neck and shoulders ache with the effort. She is completely concentrated on the few inches of dust in front of her nose, as she scrapes away with her trowel. Very delicately, so as not to disturb too much of the soil, she probes away, millimetre by careful millimetre.

The light is fading and she knows she ought to give up for the evening, repair to her camper van, light the stove, make some tea. Maybe a pot noodle. But she can’t help herself. She has to keep digging. Even without the support of her colleagues, she loves this task, and she focuses everything on what is in front of her, hoping for the big find.

Dusk creeps steadily closer, crawling from between the trees like a dark animal. She ignores it, because she has a job to do and doesn’t have time to waste on fanciful notions. She’s never allowed an isolated location to put her off before.

The name of the hill alone is enough to spook even the hardiest of archaeologists, amateur or otherwise.

Gallows Hill.

A gnarled old oak hangs just above her. Its branches stretch in a great twisting canopy; its spreading roots are beneath her feet, beneath the moss, beneath the area of her dig.

Scrape, scrape is the only sound, as not even a faint breeze stirs the trees tonight.

she doesn’t know what, makes the hairs prickle on the back of her neck, a creeping, tingling sensation that draws her attention. A faint breath, as of the earth itself exhaling. She looks up. 

She’s surrounded by trees. Kells Wood is not large, but large enough, isolating her from anyone else. There’s no through road here. Anyone passing is heading for one of the converted cottages, or the castle. Or Broch Farm in the distance.

She feels watched. Deer maybe, lurking in the undergrowth. Silent watchers, keeping still for minutes at a time. She frowns slightly, peers deeper into the trees.

Gamekeepers inhabit these woods. There is at least one that she is aware of. Lives in the gamekeeper’s cottage with his daughter, on the tree-lined avenue that heads up to the castle. They’re a silent bunch, if her reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is anything to go by. Not given to conversation. In all the books she’s read, they creep about, watching people. She gets too much of her knowledge and experience from books rather than real life. 

She tries to keep her thoughts light. No sense in spooking herself. After all, she’s got to come back to this spot every day for the next three or four weeks. She can’t afford to start imagining an unwanted intruder lurking about in the trees.

She was so excited when she got the funding for this project. She had studied aerial photographs of the area which hinted at the possibility of a Bronze Age broch. She pinpointed this particular hill as a likely spot, and is convinced she will find what she is looking for, despite the lack of encouragement from her colleagues at the university. The success of her funding application was a small victory, affirmation, if she needed it, that her work is meaningful. When you’re relying on the renewal of six month contracts for your academic livelihood, that matters.

Laura’s mind expands as she travels across the centuries, those thousands of years and millennia, into deep time which isn’t even deep time at all, really, but shallow time, if you weigh it up in the balance against the birth of the planet. This is the part of her job she loves, delving into the dark mists of the human imagination, accompanied by the verification of science.

Human time is so shallow, she thinks, so surface-deep, and buried under this earth are the ghostly remnants of skeletal structures that once stood tall, when this hill was bare rather than cloaked in trees as it is now. The building she is looking for is shaped like a cooling tower, where families lived protected within its circular walls, although of course only the base of those walls remain, buried by centuries of accumulated earth deposit.

This is what drives her, the way that the search can expand the mind, release the imagination into a time before, which inevitably makes you aware of the time after, and the time yet to come. Particularly poignant at the moment, she thinks, with the new rules we are living with, not to mention the current state of the world reminding us how fragile we all are.

She thinks, briefly, how people long ago thought of the trees and rocks as spirits, before they began to build permanent shelters and cultivate the land. What must it have been like to see the world through those ancient eyes, knowing so little about what things were really made of, and yet, perhaps, knowing so much more.

Rolling her shoulders to ease some of the tension from hours of stooping, she returns to her task.

It’s then she hears the crack. A twig trodden on, breaking the silence, snapping the thread of her thoughts so she’s back in the present, staring into the trees. They’re so tightly packed in places that she can’t make out anything clearly.

Then a shape, the outline of someone who seems to slip back behind the trunk of a tall pine.

She shouts across at them, ‘Hey?’ Partly to show she isn’t afraid.

But whoever is there decides to run. Too fast for her to glimpse them in the dusk. They are merely a blur between the trees, disappearing into the depths.

She stands up, takes a few steps, but they’re already too far away to see.

She doesn’t know it but above her an owl watches, hidden by foliage, waiting for its hour of dusk to arrive. 

She downs tools for the day and heads back to her camper van, taking the same narrow path through the bracken that she has taken every day since she got here.

Her sky-blue camper van sits in the lay-by below, where the road bends to the right. It’s a single-track road with no markings. Tarmacked, but too narrow for more than one vehicle. She chose a spot in a wide passing-place, with enough space to park and set up camp. It’s surrounded by trees, thick pine, and behind it, a double-rutted track made by tractor tyres cuts through into an unappealing stretch of woodland where no one goes.

She feels a little uneasy, and is annoyed with whoever disturbed her. If they had anything to say, they should have made their presence known and she’d have shown them what she was working on.

The sight of her van brings a smile to her face. Laura loves her van. It’s home for now, containing all she needs to keep body and soul together. Seeing its sky-blue exterior and metal trim is like catching a glimpse of home lurking down there, waiting to embrace her with its warmth.

But as she draws nearer she can see there’s something lopsided about the way it sits, something not quite right. Before unlocking it, she takes a look around. One of her tyres is flat. She stands back to look properly.

‘Shit,’ she murmurs. 

She has a spare, but it’s still a nuisance, and she’s tired. 

She just wants to relax. She bends to inspect it. Was it like that earlier? A slow puncture perhaps.

She goes to the back of the van where she keeps her jack, and the spare. She wants to get this fixed before the light fades.

As she works, her head bent to the wheel, her sense of unease grows. She looks around her nervously. What she doesn’t want is for a pair of boots, male boots, to suddenly appear within her line of vision out of the surrounding forest.

She works on, trying to ignore a mounting sense of dread.

Should she trust her instincts and get the hell out of there?

But first she needs to fix this tyre.

When at last it’s done, she flings her tools down and takes a long look about her. Shadows are gathering between the dark corridors of pine.

Scooping everything up and replacing it in the boot, she climbs into her camper van and locks the doors with a huge sense of relief. 

She tries to settle down for the night, lights her gas-burner, places the small camping kettle on it, filled with water.

The night stretches ahead of her. The idea of being parked up here on the edge of Kells Wood seems suddenly a little disconcerting. She has good locks though, and a car alarm. She’s sure she’ll be fine.

Gallow Falls by Alex Nye is published by Fledgling Press, priced £10.99.