A rural Limburg community responds to the arrival of coal prospecting and a drilling tower on the heath, as everyday life, landscape and labor are unsettled. Through scenes of a young girl and her mother visiting neighbors, conversations with a student home on leave, and children’s tales of witches, the story shows how the promise of mining work alters livelihoods, parish routines and local hierarchies. Personal decisions, economic need and clerical unease expose tensions between tradition, poverty and modernization as industrial change encroaches on the village’s social and moral world.