The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), a novel by Italo Calvino’s tells the story of a group of travellers that meet at a tavern. For an unknown reason the characters are unable to speak so they use a tarot card deck to recount their journeys to each other. The work poses burglar bar motifs (based on those seen in yards and houses around Richmond, NC) as symbols or signs that hold ‘deeper meanings’ and could be read in a similarly divinatory manor as tarot cards. By doing so it prompts imaginative musings on the lives, fates and destinies of those that have settled behind these fences or have since scattered with only the ‘deep soil’ of the Karoo remembering their passing.