Modern archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age barrow in a Mendips wood find the remains of a woman placed in a funerary urn. The barrow had already been ruptured by deep ploughing when the cemetery was planted with trees early in the twentieth century, but the urn somehow survived. The archaeologists disinter the urn, and study the remains of the woman that it holds. Once their work is done, one evening while white moths flit in the shadows of trees, they rebury the woman’s remains in a replica urn. As they do so one of them speaks a blessing at the graveside – a reburial ritual performed
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