Mairi McGloughlin loves the land but as she is a girl the family farm will go to her brother Ian, who wants to be a poet. When Mairi leaves school to look after her widowed father and her brother, life begins to take its plotted course; her father hopes she will marry the farmer's son next door, a marriage in which Mairi can see the sense, but there is also Robin the scholar, her brother's best friend who has been a thorn in her side since they were children. However, all this is turned on its head by the bloodbath of the 1914 war. The young men are caught up in the struggle, either as soldiers or conscientious objectors and sometimes as both and Mairi remains on the farm, watching the circle of the seasons, and coming to grips with a changing world where only the land and love are constant.