Dick Young stays in his friend Professor Magnus Lane's house in Cornwall, on the understanding he will be a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has developed. As a result of the experiment he is transported back to fourteenth-century Cornwall. With each 'trip' he becomes more and more involved with medieval intrigue, adultery and murder. Is it merely hallucination; a subconscious escape from his own complicated life, or a real journey into the past?

He becomes obsessed with the world he visits, and past and present eventually become inextricably and perilously mixed.