Hollowmere is a village of ninety-one people at the bottom of a valley with a beck running through it, and in the middle of it stands a ring of stones the size of a cart wheel. The fire in that ring was burning before the oldest story in the valley begins, and it has not gone out since. Two iron bars stand in the ring, driven deep into the stone, and every washing line in Hollowmere is strung from those bars to a post by the beck. On a still evening in July the lines make a roof over the ring. Nobody in Hollowmere feeds the fire, and that is the thing people find hardest. There is a woodpile behind every house and there has never been a stick of wood in that ring. In the spring Tam Rooke tipped a barrowload of dry pine on the hot stones and stood back to watch it catch, and then he picked the sticks up again one at a time. There is a market day in Hollowmere and it is held around the ring, with the stalls roped to the same bars. The fire is the warmest thing for a mile in winter. These days they just watch it.

The wall between Coe Paddock and Rooke Paddock took nineteen years and a lawsuit. Old Hew Trewin drew the line between the two farms in the year the wall went up, and then the beck moved the foot of the hill and the soil on the Coe side went. Rees Trewin, who was Old Hew's son, and Ollie Coe, whose family had grazed on that side before the wall was thought of, agreed on that much in one morning in May. They agreed on nothing else. The mason wanted two hundred and forty pounds to take the wall down and set it on the true line, and the Coes had come off a bad lambing. The shouting happened at the washing line, because that is where everyone at that end of the village hung their washing on a Tuesday evening in May. Ollie Coe put both hands on the line above his head and leaned into it, and he said to Tam Rooke the thing he had said in the shearing shed and the thing he had said in the pub, and Tam gave him back a shorter version. The fire jumped.

Not a flicker. It came up over the top of the ring in one movement, orange, higher than the bars, and the sheets took the light and every face at the line was lit from underneath. There were eleven people there and not one had touched the ring. Then the two men stopped, because they were embarrassed, and the fire went down as fast as it had come up. Nobody spoke for a bit. Then Ivy Marlow, eighty-one, said from the post at the end of the line. “You could all have had a fire like that on any Tuesday you had a mind to,” she said, “and none of you ever have, and I have had my eye on this ring for sixty-one years, and here is the whole of it. It eats what is said at the washing line and nothing else. It grows on what is said to somebody kindly. It has never taken a stick of wood in the history of the valley. It starves where nobody speaks at all. And it dies dead where spite settles into a habit.” She put her hand flat on the post. “Nineteen years of my husband saying that woman waters her row too near the boundary, and me saying worse,” she said. “This is what it has been living on.”

Nell Rooke was sixteen, and she hung her family's washing at the ring every second day because her mother had a bad shoulder. She noticed the fire first in the way a person notices a clock that has been in the room all their life. On a Thursday a woman said to an old man holding a wet sheet, “That's better, that, you've cut your hair,” and the fire came up to the height of the ring stones and stayed there. She tried singing on the Friday, because she could sing and because she was pushing a barrow of sheets she did not want to spill. The song was an old one her grandmother taught her about a girl who rows out past the bar to meet the boats. The fire did not leap. It came up and settled and stayed, a hand higher than it had been all day, and the heat came down on the lines so that her sheets were dry by four o'clock.

Nell tried the next thing without meaning much by it. Gedge Pyke was disliked by everybody in Hollowmere and deserved to be. On the Wednesday she hung her washing beside his line and said to his wife, in front of six people, “Your house has a good roof on it. That is the true thing about your house.” Which was true. The fire did not move. It did not drop either. It sat there, knee high, while the whole line waited. Then she tried it at the gate, off the lines, kindly. “Your roof is a good roof, Mrs Pyke.” Then inside her own house, to her mother, with the door shut. So she learned two things in one week. It wanted a line. And it wanted the words to somebody.

The wedding was the last Saturday in June. Winnie Trewin married Ollie Coe at the ring, in the rain, because the chapel was full and the ring was bigger. They propped a shuttered window on two poles to make an altar, and the rain came through it in one stripe that stood steaming on the stones. They were marrying in the middle of the wall business. Ollie Coe still owed half a mason's price for a wall he had not paid for. The whole village came, which it does for a wedding, and which it had not done for a funeral that year. At the washing line that morning the valley talked about the wedding for three hours without once mentioning the wall, and the fire came up higher than anybody had seen it in daylight. Then the speeches started. Ollie's cousin Peth got up on a flat stone, and what he said was true, which is the trouble with a true thing said to a wedding party. He said that Ollie Coe had held the Coe's ground against the Trewins for nineteen years and never taken an inch off his neighbour.

That was true. It was also, as Winnie said afterwards on the chapel step, the kindest possible way of telling every Trewin in the valley that they had spent nineteen years on the wrong side of a line. The fire went down about a hand's width, in the middle of a hundred people, in front of everybody. Then Ollie Coe got up on the stone and said, “Rees Trewin put that line in the wrong place and I knew it and would not have the wall moved. That is not me being straight. That is me being proud. I have had nineteen years to be sorry about it and never once said so out loud. There. I have said it.” Then he said his wife was the better judge of both families, and the fire went up past the bars and stayed there all afternoon.

The fever came into Hollowmere in August and it came the way fever comes into a small place, which is that everybody knows about it by the following morning. It was in the Pyke house first and then in the school. The washing went up at the ring every day, because that is what you did with fever, and almost nobody said anything at all. Two women would stand at the line opposite each other holding a sheet each and neither would say one word. The talk that would have gone at the ring went into the kitchens with the door shut. The fire came down through the first week. By the second it was low enough to hide behind the stones. In the third, Tam Rooke and six other men went into the ring with armfuls of split pine and larch, the best dry wood in the valley, and stacked it in a cone over the embers. The rain came into it and went through it, and the wood went black and wet and did not catch.

That pine lay in the ring four days, and then it was carried out and burnt on a hearth at the top of the village. So you could have blamed the weather for that month, and a good many people did, out loud, at the ring, in the voice people use when they are frightened and would rather be angry. The fire did not rise for any of it. The Pyke woman came down to the line on the fourth Tuesday with the sheets for the fever wash, and there was nobody at the ring but Nell. Nell took a sheet from her and hung it, and then said, “Mrs Pyke, you sat with our Tam when he was nine and broke his arm on that wall. My mother has never once said so out loud.” The old woman stood at the line in the rain for a while without saying anything. Then she said, “Which wall?”

Ivy Marlow died on the ninth of October, in the year she turned eighty-two, in the chair by her own fire. She had said in the spring that she would not see another winter, and Dot Rooke got the dress and the box in before the leaves turned. She was buried on the hill above the beck, and afterwards the village came down and hung the washing at the ring, because that is what you do after a burial here. The fire had not been above knee height for six weeks. What happened at that line that afternoon took ten minutes and it was not a speech. Nell stood at the bars with her back to the fire and cried so much she could not have told you afterwards who started. Gedge Pyke said Ivy had put a pound a week through the post for six years to his mother and made him swear not to mention it. Dot Rooke said, “She did not raise my mother, and not one of you thanked her for it.” The fire came up over the bars and stood there, and every person at that line had done nothing at all except say out loud what they had been carrying since August.

The fire went down through November. Not into a crisis. Into a winter. It stayed about the height of a boot, and the ring stones came up round it like the rim of a bowl, and the village hung its washing at the ring anyway. The wall was the winter. The lawsuit was still open. The mason came back in December with four hundred and ten pounds instead of two hundred and forty, and Ollie's side had lost another lambing and Tam's side had lost a hay crop, and not one of them could say a civil word at the line about anything else. And that is what the winter was made of. In December nobody at the ring was unkind. If you had asked anybody in Hollowmere what they thought of their neighbours they would have told you the neighbours were all right. They get on. The talk that came to the ring was about money, to people who agreed with it. And the fire sat in its ring like a blue bead on a burnt saucer, and it got smaller.

Blue is the word this valley has for it. A blue fire does not light the stones and does not throw a shadow, and if you stand over it of a morning the worst thing about it is that it looks like it is thinking. There was one week in January when the fire came up twice, and both were false mornings. The first time it was eleven at night. Two men who had been drinking in the Trewins' kitchen came down to the line to have it out, and Ollie Coe put his hand on the bars, because nobody had ever told him not to. The fire came up in one push and threw their shadows the length of the village, and by the time anybody had got down there in a coat it was out again.

The second time it was a woman. Nell was at the ring with the school sheets when the Pyke woman came down the path shouting about a doctor who had not come, and she got as far as saying that nobody in this village would lift a finger for anybody, and the fire came up round her boots. Then she stopped, the way you do, and went back up the path, and it was out before she reached the gate. So the valley learned the other half of it. The fire wakes for anything said at the line. It stays up only for what is said kindly, and then it goes back to blue.

Nell did her part in the second week of January, and she did it small, and if you had been watching for something big you would have missed it entirely. Her own family's line was by the gate, not at the ring. She asked her mother to move it. Dot said, “Why?” and Nell said, “Because it is warmer,” which was not the reason and was true enough. Then she took a feed sack, turned the rough side out so the chalk came up white, and wrote forty names on it down one edge. Not a timetable. A list. And she worked down it, one name a day. She found the person, mostly at the ring, mostly while the person had both hands in a wet sheet, and she said one thing to that person that was true and kind. Not clever. Not long. To Gedge Pyke, who had beaten a dog in the road in June and did not know that Nell knew it, she said, “You have kept that verge tidy all winter.” She said her piece and hung her own sheet and went home. She did not wait to be thanked, and mostly she was not thanked.

It took a fortnight before anybody else noticed the fire. Ollie Coe noticed it. He said, at the end of January, at the ring, that it had been a foot and a bit on Thursday and a foot and a bit on Friday, and that on the Monday it had dried the damp out of the stones. A man said, “Whose line is that?” and Nell said, “Mine.” And Ollie Coe, who had shouted at a washing line in May, looked at a girl of sixteen with a feed sack and said, “Say something kind to me, then, and we will see if that is the whole of it.” And she said, “You carried the coffin up the hill at eighty-four, and I do not think your father was thanked for that either,” which was not true, and she knew it, and the fire did not move an inch. Then she said, “Sorry. That was a lie. It was your father who carried it. You carried the gate when the hearse turned.” The fire came up about a foot in about four seconds.

The wall was settled in the second week of February, and what settled it was not a lawyer. Ollie Coe came down to the ring at eight in the morning with the mason's figure in his hand and said to Tam Rooke that the figure was a fair one and that he had no money and would pay his half out over eleven years, and had owed it since May. Tam said, “Twenty-two pounds a year and I will take it.” Then he said, “My mother used to say your father was a hard man. He was. He was at my mother's funeral, and he did not say one word about it, and I have been angry with him for six years over a thing nobody could have got wrong on purpose.” The fire came up over the bars and stayed up, and neither of the men said anything else for a while. The masons built the wall in April, on the true line, the line Old Hew Trewin drew. The Coes pay twenty-two pounds a year for eleven years and the Rookes got the foot of the hill back. Both families say they won. In Hollowmere that is called a good ending.

The last week of April a man came over the pass with a load of hessing sacks and stopped at the ring, because he could not work out why there was a washing line strung over a fire. He asked Gedge Pyke what it was for. Pyke said, “It's for the washing.” The man said, “You've a hearth at home.” And Ollie Coe, who was splitting firewood on the far side of the ring, put the axe down. “No,” he said. “We don't want a hearth. We want it heard.” “I had it wrong for nineteen years and I'll say so here. I thought the fire was on our side. I thought if we all liked each other enough it would come up, and we do all like each other, we just never said it out loud at the line, and it sat down there all winter like a blue bead. It doesn't care what we think of each other. It never once asked us that. It asked us to say it. Out loud, at the line, to a person's face, one at a time, and most days it isn't worth saying anything much.

“You can be perfectly pleasant to each other for forty years and never say one kind word out loud, and that fire will go out, and wanting is not the same as saying. Rees Trewin drew that line wrong and he knew it and he never said so out loud for nineteen years, and it cost him his own sleep and it cost my family a wall. You just say it. At the line. To a person. That's the whole of it, and I would have had thirty years back if somebody had put it in my hand when I was twenty.” And then, because the wind had got up and his own sheets were still standing in the wet: “Well. Two of mine are not dry.”