An investigation of a family's dilemma when the 18 year old son, trained by his ambitious father for the local wrestling championships, receives his call up papers for WWI.

This is a film portrait in which the words are mostly Peter Hannaford's, an eighty-year-old Dartmoor smallholder and cattle doctor, living with his first cousin, Ruby French. The last of his kind, he talks of toads and tractors, mixing common sense with superstition, showing how Dartmoor and its people have shaped his life.