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The sheep have been up high in the meadow all week, keeping themselves to themselves. Nobody really knows why they are up there. But then nobody really knows what motivates sheep anyway, deep inside. It may have been that the weather has been unnaturally warm for this time of year and that the grass is sweeter up there after the heavy September rains.
Elsie Sidebottom has seen the ghost again, up by the planes. This is of course utter nonsense. But Elsie is adamant, as the rest of the Sidebottoms have been for years, that there is a ghost up on the moors. That in fact it has always been there, even before the plane crashed. One of the Sidebottoms, from the Brookhouses branch, recently told the Winterbottoms, who are by nature scared of ghosts and that kind of thing, that there wouldn’t have been a plane crash in the first place, if it hadn't been for the ghost. Since then little Carl Winterbottom imagined the ghost to be some kind of a very tall, bearded man, holding a powerful lantern up into the night skies above Bleaklow. Carl worried about this a lot when he and his family returned from Magaluf last week and descended low over the Dark Peak on their approach to Manchester airport.
Old Tom Hollingworth had other concerns than a measly ghost. He was just keen to get up to the planes before the fell runners did. Tom despises fell runners. He told Liz Blackshaw once, when she offered him a glass of water outside her cottage, saying he looked parched, read more |
