When his ship docked, unexpectedly, in Yarmouth, sailor Arthur Tresize's life was transformed into a surreal-seeming fairy story of unexpected wealth, a cursed piece of land and whispers of witchcraft.

Buying up the disused land of the monks at Ockley in Suffolk, he built himself a house from the remnants of the old ruined Priory and settled down to raise a family. But the magic and suffering imbued in the stones of the house were not finished with the Tresize family yet.

Norah Lofts revisits her fictional town of Baildon and its surroundings, adding the Old Priory into the histories of Ockley, Clevely, Layer Wood, Muchanger and Merravay. Over the next sixty years the fortunes of the Tresize family mirror the story of the house they lived in, its growth, its decay, the tragedies lived out within its walls and-finally- resolution.