On a lighter note, if one cannot live forever, one can try to stay youthful in spirit for as long as possible, and it is widely acknowledged that being in love is one of the best ways of so doing. It is fitting, therefore, that there is a superstition here that if a maiden wears necklace of dried rosehips this will help her attract a man.

When the children of Gatshire grow up, they may go to university in town, where they may read archaeology and study what was happening in Gatshire when the squabble over the elixir was supposed to have been going on. (Don’t misunderstand me; there are gnomes and fairies in Gatshire; what is almost definitely not true is that the secret of eternal life was ever discovered.) In reality, what we do know is that in the beginning, as far as the human history of the small area of land now called Gatshire is concerned, was the Wood. This was what the first settlers to arrive here found. It covered the whole of what would become the county; even today a substantial portion of Gatshire is forested, the dominant species being various conifers and, on the deciduous side, sycamores, ashes and birches. We cannot say precisely when people first came to this wood. The earliest archaeological remains yet discovered in the county date back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic, around 12,000 years ago. After a gap of several thousand years come the first settlements, at two Late Neolithic sites known as Gatshire-A and Gatshire-B. Radiocarbon dating indicates both were inhabited around 2000 BC. Anthropologists expect to be able to say in the not too distant future where these newcomers came from. Investigation of skeletons from the sites has merely confirmed their Caucasian origins, but an on-going analysis of DNA samples taken from them may shed further light on this. Perhaps when all the data have been analysed scientists will be able to create a computerised image of the face, or faces, of one or more of our ancestors; the County Museum is collaborating with the local university on this and they hope soon to exhibit realistic life-size models of Gatshire’s original inhabitants.