Every warm season a bluesman sets up on the off-world side of the junction — I call him Bob, after Robert Johnson, who legend says tuned his guitar at a midnight crossroads with a trickster god and walked away soulless and brilliant. I have never once heard the blues on the Hellsborough side of The Hinge; the music over there is a weirdness wholly removed from anything you'd recognise. Which leaves me wondering, on the bad nights, what I myself handed to milting in exchange for mastery of the semagrams and this crossroad.

Somewhere in the beacon woods there is a natural stone amphitheatre where flappers sing, and the murk thins there for the duration of their song, and you feel - briefly, unreasonably - at peace. My first rule of The Dark Peak: if something feels safe, you have misidentified the threat.

Psycmask projection turns any broad flat surface into a venue — Gren demonstrated this in the copse at The Dun by throwing a full Otoboke Beaver set onto the girth of the largest beech tree, the sound filling the hollow like it had been designed for it. Otoboke Beaver are from east of the hicks, their lyrics apparently in an old Dark Peak dialect, although none of the youth seemed entirely certain they understood the words, and none of them admitted it.

Lemmingsville was never performed, never announced, and had no listed audience — John had only ever hummed it while stacking glasses on the Middlewood road, in what he believed was solitude. Boggy Lomas of the Dark Peak District Council knew every verse, every lyric, and had drawn character conclusions from the bridge chorus alone. In Hellsborough, it seems, your songs know you long before you do.