Off the Beaten Path

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After finding a flat patch of grass, he set his tent up for the night, gathering some dry wood nearby which he gleefully turned into a camp fire with the aid of some lighter fluid and matches. Building fires was one of Robert's favourite parts of camping in remote areas. He often thought that there was something of the arsonist about himself, but that was a fact he kept only for his trips into the wild, and in any case he loved nature and was always careful not to harm it.

Night fell and, unimpeded by the false light of man, the stars shone bright and bold. After a few hours of sitting next to the warm glow of the fire, Robert reluctantly turned in for the night excited by the prospect of another day's adventure in the morning.

In the early hours the fire still smouldered and Robert felt refreshed and rested; more so than he had done for many years. Packing up his belongings and making sure the fire was extinguished, he set off once again.

It had rained slightly during the night, but thankfully the road was relatively dry. After cycling for another hour Robert noticed a change in the landscape. It had become more unkempt, less constrained. The trees seemed closer together and any occasional gaps in the forest scenery were filled by clearings and small fields which had obviously been left unattended for countless years.

Robert realised that he had travelled far enough into the forest that he was now out of the reach of even the park rangers who would normally maintain such a place. It seemed as though, beyond this point, the land had been neglected by its carers for some reason. The thought that even those familiar with that wilderness were afraid to tread there, flirted with his attention momentarily before being quickly dismissed as a flight of fancy.

The sky grew grey as the day wore on and it was clear that rain of a substantial volume was well on its way. After pushing his bike up a steep incline which he felt was too uneven to cycle on, Robert reached its peak revealing a landscape which opened up, sprawling forward between pockets of woodland and still, stagnant pools of water slumbering in a deep set valley below which stretched across the land for miles. It was populated by sparse areas of long vibrant grass, which in places gave way to the wandering boundary of the forest.

With rain imminent, Robert decided that he would set up camp early in a wide circle of grass he could see at the foot of the hill. Not half an hour later he was there, the tent was up and all that was left was to gather some firewood.

It was important to get a fire going as quickly as possible, as the Scottish midges (a type of fly which feeds on blood) were out in force and the smoke would help disperse them. The only problem was that Robert had picked a camping spot dominated more so by grass, bushes, and shrubs than trees. He would have to venture out across the valley for a little while and gather from one of the wooded areas nearby.

A collection of pine and fir trees which seemed to form an isolated island of woodland, about half a mile across, was close enough to his camp and after ten or fifteen minutes trudging through the long green grass, occasionally sinking his foot unwittingly into remnants of a marshy bog below, Robert found himself at the edge of the woods.

Its boundary was dominated by older trees which had long since withered, covered by thick brown hanging moss - nature's own burial shroud. The broken trunks of once beautiful and majestic Pines and Sycamores littered the ground, open and rotting from the inside not unlike a poor wounded animal. It occurred to Robert that these woods seemed somehow out of place. The trees did not belong to the landscape as others did. The long grass which characterised the entire area seemed to thin out and change from a healthy natural green colour to a morbid yellow-brown. As this thought ruminated, accompanied by an increasing sense of unexplainable dread, Robert realised that he was looking at a large dead ring of grass which followed the tree line perfectly, encircling that pocket of woodland as if marking the limits of a tomb.

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