Duration 2.29

Raskado Fallcastle was a retired ship's navigator turned Suffolk farmer, who privately invented maps from the black and white hides of his dairy herd. The Easter before the Violent Unknown Event, while staying with his sister-in-law in the Golden Valley near Hereford, Raskado met Gandy Ova, a cartographer employed by the Ornithological Society to plot the distribution of owls in the Black Mountains. Raskado and Gandy exchanged maps. 

At 11:41 on the evening of the VUE, Raskado and Gandy Ova were standing together under a hot shower in a caravan-site wash-house on land owned by Raskado's sister-in-law. The following morning, Gandy Ova's body, covered in red and white blotches, was found on the wash-house forecourt and the local police accused Raskado of murder by scalding.

The police confiscated the cow maps as evidence, and refused bail, Raskado was held in custody for seven days before the full details of the VUE were known. The imprisonment, the bereavement, a sense of guilt and rapidly developing VUE symptoms of deafness and nausea, unbalanced Raskado's mind. On his release he bought a rifle, slaughtered his dairy herd and tarred out the white patches on their hides.

With the money from the knacker's yard, Raskado bought building materials and attempted to reconstruct the Herefordshire wash-house on his Suffolk property as a memorial to Gandy Ova. Then, learning of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds, Raskado bought a shotgun and two untrained retrievers and began a vigorous campaign of ornithological slaughter, incinerating the bird corpses every Friday night in the reconstructed wash-house. 

When the police began circulating his photograph, Raskado abandonded his farm and found his way to the bird sanctuary at Minsmere to continue his onslaught. After three days of mayhem, Raskado took the cow maps, a suitcase of clothes Ova had taken off in the shower-house and a can of petrol, and he burnt himself to death in a bird hide in a marsh overlooking the sea.

The Falls