Not a tramp in the country but a sedate walk through a sculpted avenue of trees. Trees planted in neat rows that visibly demonstrated humanity’s mastery over nature, a comfort to her mother.

Sarah read Dad’s nameplate to make sure they’d got the right one.

“He loved this place” said the nameplate.

“Did he?” Sarah thought. It seemed tame compared to the wild powerful rush of windborne oxygen one got on a mountaintop. “This Place” reminded her of the Tree museum in the Joni Mitchell song where they charged the people “a dollar a time just to see ‘em”. It wasn’t the wilderness he yearned for but rarely saw in his later years.

And after this morning’s revelations how much that she presumed about Mum and Dad was actually true?

At some point her parents had decided to cast their relationship into a lifelong iron bond resistant to boredom and disillusion and the dissolve of dreams? Millions had made these traps for themselves in late twentieth century only to see successive generations rise below them and try to cast them off.

She listened to the tittle-tattle about her mother’s various new friends at the church and realised that they had rarely ever spoken about Dad even when he was alive, except to use him as a way of stopping a phone call abruptly. “Must get your father’s brisket on, you know what he’s like.”

The young, self-satisfied Sarah of a few hours before had missed the clues because in her mind her parents hadn’t quite been real, just predictable “relatives” whose conversational paucity forced her to flee back to the city after scarcely an hour in their company.

It had changed this morning when she had opened the forbidden safe in Dad’s study to retrieve his ashes. Reaching in, she had found with them, a pile of letters written by a Scottish lover years ago, before she’d been born.

The strangest thing though was that after the initial stab of pain on her mother’s behalf, it didn’t seem strange at all. If anything it felt like the obvious answer to all the nagging questions she’d never asked.

Mum had popped her head in, seen Sarah looking at the letters, made a disapproving huffing sound like the one she’d made when Sarah had been caught smoking out of her bedroom room window and left.

Did he love this place? No! He loved Mountains, and boys-own adventures and a young Scottish man called Andy who attached sprigs of heather to his letters. But he’d put his true love aside for suburbia and respectability. And if he hadn’t done that she wouldn’t have existed.

From respect to her mother whose own story might carry even more pain, most of the ashes were scattered here in the place he hadn’t really loved. The old lady looked after them dry-eyed as they fluttered. “You always took after your father” she said bitterly.

But Sarah retained a tablespoon full of ashes in a small plastic bag.

And the next spring when she and her partner Jacqui headed north on their annual trip to Scotland to conquer various Munros she took the final pinch with her to scatter on the free, fresh, highland wind.