images from a story abandoned in favour of a change of circumstances

by uzwi

All morning a curious kind of light, in which several colours were represented but only faintly, came and went the other side of the window, tinting the paper I was working on. Later: though the remains of the Roman city were closed, we could park up and enjoy an extensive view of the floods around Buildwas Abbey and Sheinton. Near Plowden at the south end of the Mynd, we were briefly lost in a geomorphology of mysterious wooded lumps in perpetual winter twilight. Who comes out of a place like that unchanged? The path over the Mynd has three names, the best of which, with its implications of commerce to and from some inland quay thirteen hundred feet above and a hundred miles away from the nearest present sea level, is the Port Way. As you shuffle along it in the cold low cloud, little cries and farm noises come up, and you are made aware of the drowned lowland villages off to the west.

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