This is an unflinching portrayal of life in a coastal Yorkshire village three hundred years ago with its folk lore, old farming methods, superstitions and traditional remedies.
Mary Jordan shares her damp, chalkstone cottage in Filey Bay with five growing boys and an unsympathetic husband. William Jordan is a farmer and customs officer. In league with the local smugglers, all is well until a keen young excise officer arrives.
Mary's boys don't help matters. Young William bullies and plays cruel tricks on his brothers, enjoys all manner of sports and, mentored by his uncle, learns to shoot... which ends in disaster. Francis falls for a woman eight years his senior. He suffers all the confusion of adolescence, not helped by an increasing obsession with his uncle's puritanical teachings. And then there's 'poor John' who is retarded. He's unable to work like the others, but finds simple pleasures in nursing a newborn piglet and learning the ways of shepherding. He becomes Mary's one consolation as she comes to terms with a crucial death in the village - that of their only midwife and healer.