This is a story of landscape and community, a way of life descended from Anglo-Saxon and Viking farmers. It is a story that could belong to anyone who has lived their early years growing up on a modest dairy farm. It is about static lives, but also about movement and change; about understanding how the past walks through us, mapping our present and future. Whilst the present is a winding road that has taken me through the Middle East and back into Swaledale, I carry my early years spent in a little country. A little country that no longer exists in the form it once did - except, that is, in every fibre of me.