As I drove out one September morning, I told myself I was looking for the ghost of Laurie Lee. We’d driven from Bristol, under Blade Runner skies and talked of consciousness and intelligence whilst the SatNav cheerfully slaughtered place names.

Our destination was the Cotswold village of Slad – the setting for Cider With Rosie and starting point for As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Two books I devoured in my impressionable teens which set my feet to wandering and, eventually, my fingers to writing.

We parked close to the Woolpack pub. Opposite was the church and beside that what was once the school house. Three points of reference to geolocate by, three points anchoring the web holding Laurie Lee in this gravity well of a V-shaped valley.

Holy Trinity church stands at the centre of the village, surrounded by parishioners graves. So many graves that a winding path zig-zags up behind the church to a much higher level plot almost at steeple height. Here must lie the characters from his books: Cabbage-Stump Charlie, the local bruiser; Albert the Devil, a deaf mute beggar; perhaps even Percy-from-Painswick with his womanising ways. And his family: the brothers and sisters; his mother who single-handedly raised them all; perhaps even Rosie herself?

Inside the church is a tribute to Slad’s most famous son. Newspaper articles, photographs, anecdotes all cut and pasted haphazardly onto boards. We see Laurie dressed as John Bull aged around 6 surrounded by family. Mention is made of an egg juggling machine that he collected, (amongst other peculiarities), for an exhibition of the weird and the wonderful. Or perhaps it was an egg polishing machine, I forget. Faces stare out from the early 1900’s unaware that a Second World War is coming. The church waits patiently, like an old relative who nobody knows what to do with now his day is done. Outside, graves are being swallowed by grasses and briars. A wheelbarrow stands ready for someone to do something with it.

The village houses have been bought, extended, ‘improved’, gated, walled, sanitised. No simple sons of the soil these new Sladonians, no mere operators of wheelbarrows or shears or lawnmowers or haymaking equipment. But then Cider With Rosie was already an obituary for a lost way of life when he wrote it in 1959. Time to search for what time had left behind.

We intend to walk part of the Laurie Lee Wildlife Way. It was easy to find, less easy to follow. Every now and then one of his poems graced the faint outline of the path we traced across a field, or through old beech woods and past forlorn ponds. The valley was bereft of its children, left in an unnatural silence like one V-shaped empty nest being eyed by malevolent magpies.

What would Laurie have made of the absence of butterflies, the loss of flowers and birds, culled badgers and myxomatosified rabbits? Birdsong was sparse, drowned out by a passing helicopter and the incessant throb of homebuilding equipment. No Entry and No Footpath and Private Roads inform our halting progress through the ghosts of his memory. Climbing a steep road we spotted Slad’s answer to Banksy. Twenty, thirty fenceposts each with a badger drawn on it, performing some task or another. At least I’d found my badgers.

At one point we asked a woman for directions. Her horse watched us with equine amusement before backing out of the horsebox where she’d struggled to lead it. We left the two of them regarding each other, adversaries in a game they’ve played before.

We counted one bumble bee and one large white butterfly in total before heading past apple orchards and back to Slad, stopping off at the Woolsack for a non-alcoholic half and cheese toastie.

I struck up a conversation with the young barman. ‘Where did Laurie Lee used to sit?’ My question left him dumfounded, so a customer piped up from my side of the bar, pointing out his favoured spot in the snug. The piano and guitar suggests music is still played here – something Laurie would have appreciated remembering that he set off to Spain with only his fiddle and a pack of treacle biscuits.

Slad valley is no longer the bustling place it was when Laurie was a boy in the early 1900’s. Only his words remain, painting the picture of a way of life that he saw evaporating in front of his eyes. Now his charming T-shaped cottage has a building site next door, large enough to fly a plane in, and the new villagers have swapped haymaking for more lucrative pastimes.

We trod in his footsteps as gently as the first leaves of autumn, daytime vampires inhabiting the void of the working week. The valley he loved can be viewed from his pub seat window, but I had no sense of his presence.

There was an autumn day, almost forty years ago, when Shona and I walked hand in hand through Westonbirt’s tree-lined ways and exchanged greetings with an old man sat peacefully on a bench. He’d watched us approaching through dappled sunlight, and I had a strong sense of his reminiscing of when he too was young and in love. We were a mere 14 miles from Slad and Laurie Lee would have been close to my age now.

It wasn’t his ghost I’d been searching for.