The Long Ridge

The first cairn on the Long Ridge had been built twice, and Orla knew the second builder’s hands before she had walked round it.

The treaty cairn was there, or what sixty years of sheep and weather had left of it: a spread of grey stone knee-high, with the lichen on the wrong sides where somebody’s grandfather had turned it looking for the mark. Four paces east of it stood another. Waist-high, dry-built, the flat faces out, the top stone chosen and levelled so a circle could sit on it; and at its foot, on a slab set flush with the turf, a triangle cut with a point inside it, sharp, this year’s cutting, not yet grey.

“Hallam’s mark,” she said. “The guild on their side uses the triangle. We use a cross in a ring.” She crouched and put her thumb in the cut. “She’s built a station on…