In Wales, around 1800, Catherine Morgan is widowed young, her husband a war casualty whose unpaid gambling debts threaten both the loss of home and farm and destitution for her and her daughters Elen and Emily. Catherine hopes to save them by selling their cattle at a distant market. She must overcome the hardships of the cattle drive across the craggy Welsh countryside as an obsessively infatuated sheriff, whom she does not love, attempts to thwart the drive; and she must work out her insecurities in her relationship to his half-brother, an experienced drover, who helps her on the drive.