The adventures of the Spiller family are set amongst the villages and towns of the stunning West Dorset countryside. A family destined to poverty after their father's death on the battlefield during the early days of the First World War. Lily, his indomitable widow, remarries, but her new husband's thirst for cider undermines her efforts to find a permanent home for herself and her three children.
After being forced to leave their accommodation and employment in Charmouth, the family is pushed from relation to relation on farms and dwellings within the surrounding beauty of the Marshwood Vale.
Lily eventually finds a home in the village of Thorncombe but can little realise how much their lives will change in the space of a few short years. No more so than for her two sons, Jack and Fred, whose futures are shaped by the struggles they've endured and the people who now hone their need to succeed.
For one of them, the magnet of success becomes all-consuming. Nothing, or no one, it seems, will stand in his way to achieve it...or will they?
