Bill Page has lived most of his life in South Worcestershire, within sight (on a clear day) of the northern end of the Cotswolds, that line of distant blue hills of his childhood. 

In his teens, he would cycle the long miles south and climb the steep and narrow lanes that wound up to the undulating plateau of the hills. 

With the help of a tattered old one-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map he would travel the lonely byways (as they were then), searching out the sites of Roman villas and settlements, and exploring the Neolithic barrows which must themselves have been ancient landmarks seventeen hundred years ago.

In the far-off days before metal detectorists stalked the land he would sometimes find, by eye alone, shards of pottery and the occasional third or fourth century Roman coin lying in the autumn stubble or winter ploughland.   

And always it was the Fourth Century, that final century of Roman Britain, which particularly fascinated him, its air of elegiac mystery still permeating those Cotswold landscapes long after the harshness of the lives of most of the men and women who lived in those times had been forgotten. 

They believed in the existence of many strange and sometimes terrifying local gods. Among these were the numberless genii loci – guardian spirits of individual places – and also the genii cucullati, the three little enigmatic cloaked and hooded spirits, protectors against evil in an often unkind and dangerous world. And sometimes, in the remote places of the hills, in the winter mists or in the half-light of summer dawns and evenings, it can seem as if those spirits are still there, still present after all those long centuries.                                                                       

Silently watching and remembering.