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Not far from my home in Armandbury, near Huddersfield, there is a tower on a hill.

It dominates the skyline, a big square, late Victorian building built to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee.

There has been a castle of one kind or another here for at least four thousand years.

It was the site of a late Bronze Age, then an Iron Age hill fort,

then a twelfth century castle, with a village sprawling down the hillside.

It has been mined for coal since then, but you can still see the earthworks,

and people have found arrow points and coins, and sections of vitrified

rock where the settlement was burnt and rebuilt over its centuries of occupation.

And the place is ceded with stories. Fictionalized versions of Castle Hill and the woods

around have appeared several times in my own work, and whenever I'm feeling depleted or sad, I head up there to clear

my head, and it never fails to sustain me. My favourite walk takes me on a gentle curve that brings me

all the way down the lane, and over the stream towards the woods before heading out and over

the fields up onto the hill itself. There's a little stone bridge over the stream,

where my daughter and I would play pooh-sticks, and I often stop there and watch the ghosts of

who we were, and remember. Molica Wood lies just beyond, described in the Huddersfield Chronicle

of 1894 as an earthly paradise, its hidden entrance being suggestive of another

Better Eden. A little stone style marks the entrance. And in spring there are bluebells and

aconites and wild garlic growing all along the stream. In summer I pick blackberries, and in autumn

I gather acorns and hazelnuts and chestnuts. In winter,

all these memories remain in hibernation. Under the frost, it still smells of earth and fallen leaves

and petricore, and there are dead trees covered in moss and stepping stones, and old rope swings left by children long ago.

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