The Morville Hours, like the garden, has always felt like a shared enterprise. I owe a great debt of gratitude first of all to Ken Swift, who found Morville, and for his love and support in the making of the garden and the writing of the book; also to Paul and Ruth Heslop and Tony Bradley for helping the dream become a reality. Thanks too to all my Shropshire friends and neighbours for sharing their stories with me: Pat, Arthur and Ian Rowe; John and Brenda Lane; Joyce Needham; Sir George and Lady Labouchere; Rachel and John Norbury; Ivor Bishop; Les, Dennis and Joyce Cooper; Nick Watkins; Derek and Harold Pugh; Dan Rudge; Wilf, Roger and Toni Cantrill; David Meredith; Reg May; Karl Liebscher; Alan George; John James; Tom Smith and Liz Beazley; Natalie Hodgson; Ioan Davies; Mirabel Osler; and John and Pauline Napper. I am grateful also to Prof. Vincent Gillespie for his early encouragement and advice about liturgical matters; Dr Margaret Howatson for patiently fielding queries about classical mythology and much else besides; Emma-Kate Lanyon, Curator of Archaeology and Social History, Shropshire County Museum Service, for access to and information about the Romano-Celtic figurine in Much Wenlock Museum; Daniel Lockett, Curator of Geology at Ludlow Museum, for identifying the pebbles from the garden; the staff of the Shropshire Records and Research Centre, Shrewsbury, for help in deciphering the obliterated first page of the Morville Parish Register; the Rev. Hugh Patterson for information about the patron saints of Morville; Simon Cowan for help with tracing the lost roads of Morville; Ann Scard for answering my questions about tufa; Patricia Scott for sharing information about the Warren and Weaver families and for help with genealogies. Thanks also to Brian Goodwin, who first taught me about bees, and the bell-ringers of Arley and Alveley for teaching me how to ring church bells. In addition I would like to thank Dr Paul Stamper of English Heritage and Dr Jeremy Milln of the National Trust and the team at Archaeo Physica for trying to anchor my wilder flights of fancy in solid archaeological fact; any remaining pieces of folly are, needless to say, of my own devising. Thanks too to Julia Williamson and Peter Cooper for lending me the cottage at Shelve where the closing chapters were written, and to Denville, Angela and Barbara Wyke for making me so welcome there. I would also like to thank my agent Felicity Bryan for her patience and her enthusiasm; Bill Swainson, Emily Sweet and all at Bloomsbury for taking such care with the text and the design of the book; Dawn Burford for the wonderful illustrations; and finally Sandy Saunders, without whom this book might well have been written sooner, but life would have been much less fun.