The tribal leader persistently pressures One Eye to use magical paintings to improve his hunting success, not just those of the overall village. The tribal leader's son has innate cave painting abilities and an interest in bears, one of the few animals that will hunt humans. As tensions mount between One Eye and the tribal leader, the son discovers the power of his own cave paintings. This short story focuses on Ginny, a young girl, and the part she plays in a ritualistic dancing festival. This festival proceeds from one small English town to the next, finally ending at Scarrowfell on Lord's Eve day. Ginny, who is an orphaned child with an adoptive mother and a small group of friends, has nightmares and long bouts of sleep leading up to the arrival of the festival. The climax of the story involves a magical pagan ritual inside a ring of elm trees. This is a science fiction short story describing a scientific experiment in which two subjects’ rate of aging is increased in an environment that is devoid of all disease. The subjects live for the equivalent of centuries and evolve into exaggerated archetypes of male and female. Eventually they die, but not before the perpetrator of the experiment self-administers the life-altering treatment. Critiquing the tale "Scarrowfell" in the anthology "Other Edens," John Clute remarks that ""Scarrowfell"...floods the frail tale it ostensibly relates with a jumble of moods, too many characters, too much music, and expiation/initiation too complex to be explained in the pages it takes, and bevies of mummers..." The order in which the Mythago cycle works were written/published does not necessarily correspond to the order of events within the realm of the "Mythago Wood" cycle. For example, "Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn" and the novella "The Bone Forest" are prequels to "Mythago Wood" even though they were published at a later date. The novel "Merlin's Wood" (1994) and short stories in "The Bone Forest" and "Merlin's Wood" have little bearing on the events in the Ryhope wood. See the table below for a chronology of events within Ryhope wood.