The Garden of Unearthly Delights
We had walked the moors for hours, on sheep tracks and the rakes of hares, passing nothing but abandoned shooting lodges and cold gray reservoirs, when we came upon a scene of such otherworldliness that we found ourselves quite unable to decide whether it was wise to traverse it or not. It was an old walled garden, dry-stone, ivied and mossed, filled with a forest of scarlet rhododendrons in bloom – a small luxury of such trunks and antique roots that it must have been there, abandoned, for a hundred years.
Much later I found something of its strange geometry and relationship to certain local estates, but nothing has dulled of its praeternatural oddity, its feeling of being out of place and time, taken from that day.