Excerpt: The Scruffyans

1. God Bless the Stately Homes.

The report of the early morning shotgun breaking the air was the first indication to the birds and the people of the Blowdon Estate that Sir Darcey was beating his bounds. Even through the mist surrounding the ancient hall, its gardens, woods and the village in the hollow still hid details from the prying eyes of the outside world, Sir Darcey claimed to be able to take any bird or animal in any conditions. Thankfully, for him, it did not seem to matter which bird. Pheasant and partridge, certainly - but crow, songbird and seagull all fell to the aristocrat's aim. The many ponds surrounding the low marsh attracted migrant waders, but never for long. Sir Darcey took a special pleasure in dispatching them. No incomers were allowed to intrude and disrupt the peace of the Blowdon Estate.

His Hounds would see the owner of this venerable demesne stalking the morning, an indistinct shape moving with slow precision through the mist, stately as a galley in procession, sailing through the grey. They, however, were hounds with human eyes. They knew how to react to the imprint of their master on the mist, thankful that Sir Darcey Blowdon knew his estate - every blade and every worm, as he often commented - and he expected everything and everybody in its allotted place. When the figure, wiry and alert, muffled by layers of wool and tweed, scarved and balaklava'd walked his grounds in the minutes after dawn, the men - they operated in teams of two - would switch on their arm patches. Small red lights, blinking through the haze, told the apparition of the morning that the shapes were not intruders, but the men he employed to keep the outside world at bay. The men he called his Hounds, out of affection and memory. The Blowdon Estate and the village that carried its name were places where memory died hard and history lingered slowly.

Sir Darcey's day always started early. Whatever the time of year, the alarm clock would loudly tick its way to ten minutes before dawn. Almanacs made sure that he was exactly on time every day. Dir Darcey would claim that the sleep he lost in the summer he would make up for come the long winter nights. As he would sometimes put it, he very nearly hibernated. Not strictly true, for his ten in the evening bed time was rigorously kept to as his early morning hunt. Routine and tradition were the watchwords of the family down the ages and Sir Darcey Blowdon was not going to be the one who broke the line! Entrusted with the estate for the last thirty years, he could still remember the words of his late father, Sit Hawthorne Blowdon: "Keep on, keep all". Of course, Sir Hawthorne ("Sir Hawty", though not to his face) could never have see the upheavals and disasters of the modern day, nor the radical, but necessary steps that his only son would have to take to preserve the sanctity of their precious land. Keeping on and keeping it all, however, were ideas that the Blowdon family had always been very good at putting into practice. All the same, Sir Darcey Blowdon felt the chill in his bones - not only the cold of the morn but the feeling of the end of days. Not his days, for he still felt the full vigour of his youth, despite his nearly seventy years, but the end of times. The threats to the estate were everywhere, and the dangers of the world outside reared as black clouds over the glorious sunshine days of Blowdon. Perhaps it was to exercise his mind and exorcise these ghosts that the lord of the land patrolled his grounds, so early every morning.