The countryside feels like a cage — a stretch of damp fields stitched with barbed-wire fences, rusting tractors, sagging barns, and gossip that clings tighter than mud on boots. Horses snort in distant paddocks, crows perch on telephone lines like omens, and every road eventually leads back to the same three pubs, the same shop, the same whispered stories. Nothing here forgets. Nothing here forgives. People grow up breathing the same air and choking on the same secrets, learning early that love festers and loyalty tastes like blood.