The tree, one of many hundreds of thousands like it in that ancient forest, formed part of a wall of dense greenery on the western side of a leaf-strewn track. The forest road, while undoubtedly one of Henry Plantagenet’s royal highways, might easily have been mistaken for a subterranean tunnel, for the oaks reached up from either side and joined above, their leaves and limbs mingling promiscuously into a thick canopy and allowing only the odd parcel of daylight to gleam through. This thoroughfare, the main and indeed only direct route from Derby to Sheffield, was in poor condition that summer – one thousand one hundred and eighty years after the Incarnation of Our Lord – for there stood no sizeable manor or village nearby with responsibility for its upkeep, and its royal lord was far away, tending to his vexatious affairs across the Channel. And so in stretches it had become mired and muddy, with deep patches of near-bog, and the surface made treacherously uneven, on the drier parts, by roots and ruts, half-submerged boulders and fallen branches.
