II of II

Two of two, in the Dead in Orkney series. Pet cemetery.

In the wood, the little, intimate wood that's in the corner of our garden, where the sycamores grow only six inches above the coping stones, and resist the weather, arms laced together and heads down, like rugby players in a scrum, there is a substantial pet cemetery.

Until we bought the house two years ago, it had been lived in by the descendents of the family that built it in 1860, and they buried all their pets in the grounds. Most of them are here in the wood, though there is a scattering of slate stones around the perimeter walls, and another cluster in the chicken garden - bigger graves that look like they may contain generations of dogs. In the wood, most of the stones look as if they belong to cats (there were always cats here), though the tip of a skull emerged last year that appears to confirm that there's also a pony buried in there. Some of the graves have been lovingly tended, with pebbles marking their boundary, and ancient jars that once bore flowery tributes. The Victorian ones are faded and mossy, some of them erased, others fallen and broken. I counted 28 graves this morning, going round the garden and recording them: Mottram, Peedie, Nell, Bess, Winkie May and Beattie among them. It's impossible to capture them all, or to do the whole spread of it justice with one photograph - there's too much dappling light this morning, for one thing.

So here's one corner of the wood, final resting place of Weewun, Tinker and Tigger.