Plot Summary

Walt is a farmer living in a tiny rural village in Scotland. A former townsman, he is a rare outsider in an intensely xenophobic community, but has managed to slowly integrate, aided by a childhood friendship with bumbling Master Kent, who rules the village with inept benevolence. Since anyone can remember, the villagers have lived humbly but sustainably, hard seasons working the fields punctuated by cathartic drunken feasts. This relative contentment is shattered, however, by the arrival of a series of strangers – a map-maker commissioned to chart the land; three migrants fleeing a crisis; and an aristocratic company man determined to improve the efficiency of Kent's operations. The villagers respond to these arrivals with violence, the escalating consequences of which soon threaten their community's very existence.