Alan Garner, the brilliantly successful author of books that dazzle and haunt children - and haunt adults, too - is a man obsessed by violence; in the universe, in the ground, most of all, in himself. This film was made in Cheshire, the countryside in which Alan Garner was born and where his family has lived for generations. He shows how he came to terms with his own personal violence; and in a series of unusual film sequences attempts to show how violence, once understood, can be put to creative use.