Lorton, Cumbria.

The heat lets up with the setting of the sun, but, typically for this time of year, light lingers in the sky until late. It's my favourite time of day: light still enough to find one's path through a gate and across a field, but too dark to navigate safely among trees. The sky's a mottled grey overhead, distantly roiling with high-up wind. Rain spits and then relents. It doesn't last on the pavement.

The hills around me are dark and looming. The feeling is at once imposing and cozy. I don't know how else to explain it. I love to huddle down in the lee of a big dark hill, in the shadow of a mossy moorside as it gets darker and dimmer until it's nothing but a hulking silhouette against the sky. A while ago, Sam and I camped out on The Calf in the Howgills, deep down by an abandoned sheepfold in a pathless gully. I reckoned that no one would ever find us there by the beckside; and then lived to regret the long climb back up out of the gully in the morning.

I follow the dark road back towards the caravan park. I pass a door in a low wall, and a cemetery by a church with a spire, and a scarecrow with a white beard in a chair. I hold my phone in my hand so I can illuminate the torch if a car comes trundling past. By the gate leading back to the park, a pair of girls chatter and giggle and dive into a hedge. Ghyll barks at them.