Summary

Nidder: 'to keep under; to pinch with cold or hunger; to molest.’ America’s most important military surveillance base, Menwith Hill, is the target of a nuclear attack, resulting in the total removal of the English dale, Nidder, where the base had been located. In nearby Bradford, a Sufi Brotherhood of musicians recover in song the landscape and its people lost, including Lindis Percy, the prominent peace campaigner and lifelong National Health Service midwife, and Geoff Workman, a man who spent 105 days occupying the vast cave networks underneath the dale ‘to study the effects of darkness and the absence of time on people’.