A RAGGED-­EDGED piece of structural plywood on the edge of town carries a message, scrawled in red spray-paint: ‘We were the first, we were always the first.’ People, wrapped tight against the bitter cold, move silently through autumnal streets in the sallow, shallow weak daylight, pushing against a howling wind that blows onto the land from the sea. The landscape outside the town is an endless vista of mud and stone peppered with sad little fragments of green.

I can’t help but wonder what has brought them here – why this place, this treeless town of mud and rocks that seems to have become a home, perhaps a sanctuary, for so many? It is one of the most inhospitable landscapes inhabited by humans. If this is home, how bad must where they came from be?