George's old shepherd's caravan is a rickety vehicle behind the hay barn, set within the meadow where George Glenn kept his flock. Once used for traveling with another flock and later reduced to storing odds and ends, it becomes a charged landmark after George’s death: the sheep raid the garden behind it, watch strangers approach it at night, and see new shepherds occupy the steps where George used to sit. Around the caravan, pastoral routine gives way to questions of ownership, secrecy, and control.

Setting and Use

The caravan stands behind the hay barn, with a small fenced vegetable garden behind it. George had once used the vehicle to go around the countryside with another flock; more recently, it served mainly as a place for odds and ends. The garden held lettuces, peas, radishes, cress, tomatoes, endives, buttercups, and chives. Though it lay in the meadow, George kept the sheep out with a fence and his watchfulness.

When George is gone, the flock’s first excursion into the garden turns the caravan’s surroundings into a scene of brief, guilty liberation. Lane pushes back the gate’s bolt with her muzzle; Maude eats the buttercups, Cloud takes the peas, and Heather the tomatoes. The neatly planted beds are quickly stripped. The sheep fall silent, feel ashamed, and return to the meadow, while Othello waits by the gate and leads Miss Maple to the place behind the caravan where George’s garden spade usually leaned. It is missing. The familiar setting thus prompts not only appetite but the first material question about the weapon associated with George’s death.

Night Visitors and Suspicion

The caravan had also been a destination for visitors who came after dark. Lane remembers cars leaving the paved road for the track through the fields, their headlights cutting across the darkness or glowing in the mist. Long-coated figures approached the wooden door cautiously, avoiding fresh sheep droppings; the caravan door opened to show a rectangle of reddish light. Lane never saw the visitors’ faces, but their repeated appearances made them seem almost familiar.

Later, sheep sheltering beneath the dolmen see three people with a torch move toward the caravan, apparently looking for somewhere to hide something. Harry the Sinner complains that the torch is giving them away and that their stocking masks may be pointless if they keep calling out one another’s names. In the conversation that follows, Harry and Tom O’Malley connect the caravan and George’s land with suspected drug trafficking. They allege that boats brought goods ashore by night and that George carried them away in his car the next day; they also fear that a drugs scandal would ruin local development plans. These are the men’s claims, not a confirmation of what the visitors stored there, but they make the caravan a point where the flock’s investigation meets human disputes over land and profit.

A Place of Changing Shepherds

The caravan’s steps mark a contrast between George’s habits and the new order after his death. Gabriel finishes a fence and sits where George used to sit to smoke his pipe. Tobacco fumes mingle with the smell of wool, making Gabriel difficult for the sheep to read by scent. They take comfort in having an efficient shepherd there and anticipate his stories at twilight, even as the obscured scent unsettles their usual means of judging him.

The space also remains connected to the tools and labor of shepherding. A little toolshed stands behind the caravan, and Gabriel rummages in it before emerging with George’s scythe. He uses it to cut grass for the flock, an action that turns a familiar tool into an image of destruction for the sheep: the blades lie flattened, and the flock watches a human seemingly graze without wanting the grass. The caravan’s surroundings therefore expose a difference in how humans and sheep understand pasture—not merely as a place to feed, but as a place that can be cut, managed, and made subject to another’s purpose.

Stories and What the Caravan Holds

Later, Rebecca reads beside the caravan at night, with the sheep gathered around her. After closing her book, she tells them an improvised story about a girl with a secret father and an unsecret father. The secret father plans to travel to Europe and asks to see her; she hides her joy and keeps him waiting, and he waits himself to death. The story brings the caravan into the intimate aftermath of George and Rebecca’s estrangement without turning the place into a simple answer to their history.

At the same time, Mopple the Whale is distracted by a packet of grass Rebecca has left open after finding grass beneath the dolmen. While Rebecca sits in the dark, Mopple slips to the packet and swallows its contents before she notices. The caravan steps thus hold together the flock’s appetite, Rebecca’s grief-laden storytelling, and the ordinary objects around which the sheep try to understand human life. Across the novel’s episodes, the vehicle is less a mere backdrop than a practical center of changing authority and unresolved secrets: George’s old workplace, a suspected hiding place, Gabriel’s seat, and a gathering place for the flock.