From I was nine to nineteen, I lived on the wooden half of a former island studded with ancient burial mounds. It’s not hard to see why the place has always been inhabited: the soil is rich, there was game in the woods, fresh water and easy access to the sea.
As kids, we didn’t pay much attention to the mounds – we knew what they were, of course, but they were also excellent castles or houses when needed be, especially since the grave robbers of yore had left shallow pits in some of them, digging in to search for gold. To us, these pits became separate rooms and chambers in our woodland castles.
