The road down to Ardnashee ended in water, and had done for sixty years, but the county had never taken the sign away. Nell parked where the tarmac gave out and sat with the engine ticking, reading it. Ardnashee 2 km. Below the lettering somebody had added, in paint that had outlasted the council's, a single word she could no longer read.

It was the last week of February and the reservoir was low. That was the thing nobody had mentioned on the phone — that after the dry autumn the water had drawn back off the western shore and left forty metres of grey silt, and in the silt, if you knew where to look, the footings of the chapel.

She had known where to look before she got out of the car.

Her mother had described it perhaps a hundred times, always the same way, always in the same order: the chapel, then the schoolhouse behind it, then the row of eleven cottages running down to what had been the river. A litany. Nell had been able to recite it at nine years old and could still recite it now, and standing on the shore with the wind coming up the valley she found that every part of it was wrong.

The chapel was not at the head of the valley. It was halfway down, and it was not facing east. She stood for a long time working out whether she could be mistaken about which of the rectangles in the mud was the chapel, and concluded that she could not, because the footings were nine metres by twenty and had a semicircular apse at one end, and nothing else in a village of eleven houses would have had an apse.

Behind her a car came down the lane too fast and stopped too suddenly. A man got out holding a clipboard against his chest like a shield.

"You can't be down here," he said. "It's Water Board land past the gate."

"I know," Nell said. "There isn't a gate."

He looked at where the gate should have been, and then at the reservoir, and then, in a way she would think about for weeks afterwards, at her face — quickly, as though checking something he already suspected.

"You're Bridie Garrahan's girl," he said.

It was not a question, so she did not answer it. Instead she asked him how long the water had been down, and he said since the end of September, and she asked whether anyone had come to look, and he said, with an inflection she could not place, that nobody from the parish had come down at all.

"There's people up there," he said, nodding at the ridge, "who've lived forty years within a mile of it and never once walked down. You'd wonder."

Nell said that she would, and that she intended to, and that she had four hundred boxes of parish papers in a diocesan store in Sligo with her name on the release form. He wrote something on the clipboard. Then he told her the silt was not safe past the first line of footings, that two dogs had gone into it in October and only one had come out, and that if she was going to be down here every day she should park on the hard standing and not on the lane.

Which was, she understood, permission.