Boring bank manager Peplow arrives by the early-morning train in the small Yorkshire Dales town of Great Minden on the day of their annual Feast (fair). He chances to meet Herbert Ruskin, who used to be in the same RAF squadron and had lost his legs in a wartime flying accident ten years earlier. A cripple, Ruskin now spends all his days looking out of his window, passing witty but cynical comments on everything the locals do. As the day wears on and the fairground music gets louder, it gradually emerges that Peplow, normally a staid and unemotional man, has come to Great Minden on a macabre mission... involving the use of his service revolver! And it is no coincidence that he has come on the day of the Feast.