The scaffold is a wooden building wearing the stone building like a coat it has not finished.

Ned is already halfway up, heels on a ledger, palm testing a board the way a baker tests bread. “Putlog,” he says, which is a beam that lives in a hole in the wall, a putlog hole, on purpose. “Standards up. Ledgers across. Wedges to stop the walk. Someone’s wedge went on holiday.”

You climb. The west wind finds every gap. Below, the nave’s old round arches look smug and finished. East, the choir piers go up with pointed openings, thinner, prouder, waiting for glass.

The board under your left foot gives a little talk—not a snap, a gossip. The wedge at the putlog’s shoulder is two fingers out.

“Fix it and lash it,” Ned says. “Or we go higher first because the centering is singing too, and you are eleven and made of dare.”

He does not smile when he says dare. Dare is how boys meet courtyards the hard way.

From here you can see the south flying buttresses: stone arms that leap to outer piers, taking a shove the walls cannot keep.

Putlog holes will be filled when the scaffold comes down, little scars in the aisle walls. For now they are how the wooden building holds hands with the stone one. You can see town to the north, a smear of roofs, not a motte-and-bailey story, just bakers and a ditch. The River Wold is a brown thread south of the cloister. If you fell, the courtyard would be the lesson. Ned does not say that. He does not have to.