Scarth Wood Moor looks like empty, timeless terrain, but under the heather sits what used to be a busy Bronze Age settlement. This worn line of boulders belongs to an orthostatic wall, which is a fancy way of saying a prehistoric boundary made from big standing stones placed at even gaps. Frank Elgee first noted it in 1935, and back then it was thought to be a scrap of wall just 82 metres long.

Walking down from Carr Ridge towards the col at Clay Bank never fails to set me wondering. Is this deep gash in the hillside natural, or did centuries of boots and hooves carve it out, a proper holloway worn into the moor? Go off-piste and you will come across other gullies running alongside it, plainly the same old path splitting and rejoining, a braided track laid down by generations who never once wrote down where they were going.

Memory plays odd tricks. Yesterday mine dredged up a scene from some Disney film, the heroine wandering through a meadow with butterflies and birds fluttering about her like a doting entourage. Animators loved surrounding young women with woodland creatures. Saved them writing dialogue. This field needed video, really, to do it justice. Thistles stretched as far as the lens could see.

The gate itself is nothing to write home about. Seven metal bars, a stone post, the sort of thing you would walk past without a second glance. The gatepost once had a partner, another “stoup” standing guard on the other side, but that would have got hauled out years ago so tractors could squeeze through. Progress, of a sort. Look closer, though, and there is a carving on that post that turns up in the most unlikely places.

In 1927, the quiet ruins of Mount Grace Priory got a shock. For three days they were dragged out of their peaceful retirement and dressed up in the “forgotten pomp and ceremony” of a proper Roaring Twenties do. Grief did it. Lady Florence Bell had lost two heirs in 1926, and the Historic Pageant of Mount Grace was her way of grieving out loud, in costume, with a cast of thousands.