In the winter of 1881 John Stannard, a young architect, is in self-imposed exile in a remote English village carrying out repairs to the parish church. Arrogant and insensitive to the needs of others, he soon begins to inflict serious damage on the thirteenth century building itself and on those with whom he comes into contact, but this is nothing to the problems that arise when he catches the eye of beautiful ambitious young local girl Ann Rosewell. As the villagers tum nasty and lust leads him astray, Stannard struggles to keep a grip on his sanity and what begins as an innocent affair soon descends into a nightmarish journey that ends in murder. Set in a vividly evoked landscape, Courting Shadows pits truth against fiction, head against heart and progress against preservation. Most of all it is about the creation of fictions and our capacity to deceive not only each other but most of all ourselves.