Jesse Cliffe

The narrator opens with vivid sketches of local rivers before shifting to a bleak tract of Kennett water-meadows and a large, decaying farm called the Moors, neglected by an absentee tenant and dotted with tumble-down barns. An elderly labourer remains to tend fences and hayricks while a parish-born youth of uncertain parentage grows up as an irregular, solitary presence on the marshes. The account traces his upbringing amid silence and isolation and the routines that sustain rural life, then follows his eventual departure and the occasional later tidings of his fortunes that reach the remaining inhabitants.