Set in a mountain village in the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain during Generalissimo Franco's time of fifty years ago, when cows really did wear shoes, and the village still used sledges to thresh corn, yokes and handcrafted tools and methods unknown today. Through stories and photographs of an English family, the book records a slow-paced way of life connected to the earth that had no use for machines or money, and its bumpy transition into the twentieth century.