It rises starkly from steep slopes topped by crags and its striking appearance is emphasised by detached isolation.

Ingleborough is seen from Meregill Hole at close range and its appearance is daunting, steepening slopes topped by cliffs being a deterrent to intentions to reach the summit.

She was sitting on a hillside by a rocky stream, looking across a valley over the tops of pine trees at green slopes topped by craggy bastions of gray rock.

The angle of the sun had hardly changed, but here early-morning light shone on a paved street, and a rising slope patched brown with drought-killed grass and wildflowers, a slope topped by a stone wall two spans high or more, the stones worked rough so it seemed something natural.

Amid the layers on layers of defenses leading up to the edge of the demilitarized zone, it is easy to miss one more, added almost as an afterthought 12 years ago: a steep grassy slope, topped with barbed wire, that falls off into a 20-mile cliff of cement facing North Korea.

It was small, sealed, the crest of the slopes topped by a tangled mass of thorn-bearing trees, the slopes themselves scored by terraced fields.

The other bank of the stream was open ground - a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge.