Beyond the heather was the giant’s home, on the fell between Blawith and Broughton. You may find the spot even nowadays with little searching, if you make for a farm called Heathwaite, and up behind it to the brackenbeds between Kirkby Moor and Blawith Knott. There among the borrans which the mowers have heaped of autumns to clear the land for their leys, there is a deal of other borrans, and older ones, that no man minds the building of: though yearly work on the land keeps them up, so to say. You can see that they are ruins of a kind of homestead, with its little garths, and greater intakes on a ridge of fell. On one hand there are the waste wet mosses of the moor, and on the other hand, far below, the great flats of Woodlands, dotted with old farmsteads and thwaites, and surrounded by the tossing rocky range of Dunnerdale fells, from the Coniston Old Man on the right hand away down to Black Comb and the glittering sea.

In a high place like this, people might live for many a long year unseen and unknown of their neighbours in the dales: and if they were hunters and robbers, no doubt they could pick up a living of a sort even now: but in old times when the land was waste, it was as good a place as could be for the home of wild half-savage fell-folk. The ground is not so high as to be bitterly cold in winter, and at a time when there were trees in plenty where now is only fern or heather, they could find cosy shelter. Down in the valley at that time every thing was smothered up in wild wood, or uninhabitable for swamps and dampness, except where the ground had been cleared and drained by the hand of man. But high on the moors the ground drained itself: so that both for health and wealth it was the moor that was the chosen home of the earliest dwellers among the mountains: and their children lived on in the old places here and there, even after new comers had begun to make their farms and villages where we see them nowadays.

Here at Heathwaite fell you can see the walls of their buildings, and even in little corners what may be chambers, or store-houses, or fire-spots, or what not, curiously built of great stones: but all quite different from the farm-buildings of our own people, and plainly the relics of an earlier race. Beside these homesteads there is one heap that is round and hollow in the midst, with a spot for a doorway, and well built within and without. Though the top of it is all fallen in, one can see that it might have been a hut shaped like a beehive, and roofed over with stone walling like those Pict-houses they tell of in other parts: this would be high enough inside for a big man to stand up in, and broad enough for him to lie at length. And all about the place there are the remains of huts ruder and more ancient than even this, though not of the kind that were made in the earliest ages of all, when folk used only stone tools. These show some knowledge of walling; and yet among them is plenty of graves where the fell-folk doubtless lie buried. At one end of this settlement, as they call it, there is a great barrow in which folk digging found burnt bones and you can see the tall stone that stood at the head still standing there. They call this place the Giant’s Grave: and old neighbours tell that it is the burial place of the last of the giants who dwelt in that moorland village, and that he was shot with an arrow on that very fell side, and so was killed, and his race ended.

Well, when the big red man strode off through the heather and the ragged birches of the moor with Thorstein under his arm, this was the spot he came to. He marched in at the gate of the intake, and up to the homestead through cattle-folds with little cows of the old Northern breed and rough mountain goats, grazing between the walls: and through patches of kale and rye by the side of the tarn which lies blue and clear in the midst of the place. There in the evening sunshine, among the huts, would be a dozen or so of women and children, dirty and half-naked, both the old hags and the little goblins. They had four posts set upright in the earth, and a skin stretched over them in which was seething upon a fire of sticks a mess of flesh in its own broth. Some were making ready for the evening’s feast, and some were cobbling skins together: but for the most part they were a set of idle do-noughts, to reckon by the filth and hugger-mugger in which they lived.

They raised a screech when Thorstein was brought in and cast on the ground: and set upon him to stare at him and pull him about; until what with the raggedness of his torn clothes and their handling he was mother-naked, and not a little ashamed of his plight, and of his white skin. Not that the fell-folk were blackamoors; but they were sunburnt with going half-naked, and grimy with dirt. So there he sat, part covered with litter and bracken which he pulled over himself; and he brazened it out as well as he could.