Bowland is a slumbering secret. Fed by its rivers, streams and drops of Lancashire rain, it glows like an emerald stone on a summer afternoon. Catching the sun’s golden tears and her smile’s reflections in her watery mirrors, her heartbeat is the birds’ flurrying wings, brushing the surface of the pulsating streams below, where she divulges not her secrets, but a teasing hint of them alone, as she swirls and dances in the calmness of a pond in the woods.

When the waters rush along between the old men and women witnessing her flow, standing solid, robed in jade or gold-threaded green, an orchestra plays in sounds of wind, rippling the waters, inviting us to dance with out-stretched arms, imitating branches, mobile yet rooted, with moss-covered stone underneath our soles, part of her elfin palace.