III - The Hamlet of Amiz

As he approached the village green he was faced with a sturdy metal signpost and on it it had a large ‘T’ symbol which had a white stem and a red cross stroke; it told him there was only one way in and one way out; Amiz was a dead end.

Amiz was a network of lanes that lead nowhere. They cross-crossed each other, some with walls of high hedges either side and some open to the fields of yellows and golds either side and some others with an occasional cottage inset. By trial and error he turned around and around and around and around again until the system started to work and tell him to take a left. Slowly as he lazily drove on the two further miles, not bothering to look out for traffic he realised that Amiz was an island surrounded by swamp land and the hills, it was a peninsula of land. Then he found himself at the foot of those hills, the Black Hills and he looked through the smeared windscreen at them and saw their detail, although those far ahead were distant and hazy. Directly in front of him was a clearing and the other side of it, behind a small canopy of trees were houses. One of them stood out as his destination. It was an ancient looking place with grey solid stone walls and there on its heavy iron gates was a name plaque that read ‘The Roman House’. At its front was a courtyard garden with two large rectangular ponds that had fountains at their centres. He parked on a patch of gravel to one side of it and turned the engine off and took in the delivery