For months now there had been saplings on the abandoned hills, rising from the fern, the heather and the feg, with leaves like flags - declaring their species while still not an inch in height. There were wittans and hawthorns, but there were ash trees too, with oaks and hazels. They might have been lurking since the days of the forest, waiting for the sheep to at last depart before, tentatively, they began to remake the wilderness. The television reported that farming was dying, that it had ceased to be an industry and had become instead a life-support system, in which these Less Favoured Areas were an intolerable expense. For those looking for the root of things, well, here it was: these scrawny trees on Llanbedr Hill, riffling as far as Oliver could see, divesting the last of their withered leaves in their first successful autumn for five thousand years.