Connecting Horsingdon to Trentford, and thence travelling northwards toward St. Albans, is the Ebury Way: one of the old, straight tracks which used to form the socially-connective tissue binding together disparate communities throughout the region, and which is as ancient and mystery-haunted as it is long.
The British Isles are replete with ghosts; yet more often than not these phantoms represent a cognizable historicity, memorialising a past either remembered or about which the facts are recorded and well-known - and whose shadows demarcate moments of temporal disjuncture and conflict of consequence to those who occupy the present. There are no ghosts of Neanderthals.
Or at least very few - for the stretch of the Ebury Way pictured above is notable for the pre-neolithic spectres which have supposedly been encountered there: ghosts of things perhaps not fully-sapient, but on the very cusp of the cognitive revoution: lumpen-browed, slouching things, with protuberant faces and dressed in scraps of fur; things which howl silently at the ignobility of a universe in which their shades are allowed to inhabit an existence which they never will and never can comprehend.
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