The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 15

Many of the farm building were no longer used. The barns and pens -- red-brick walls, roofs of slate or clay tiles -- around the muddy yard were in decay; and only occasionally in the pens were there cattle == sick cattle, enfeebled calves, isolated from the herd. Fallen tiles, holed roofs, rusted corrugated iron, bent metal, a pervading damp, the colours rust and brown and black, with a glittering or dead-green moss on the trampled, dung-softened mud of the pen-yard: the isolation of the animals in that setting, like things themselves about to be discarded, was terrible.