The scent of juice and squeezed out pomace wafts around the parish hall as the Tamar & Tavy Apple Group demonstrates communal crushers and presses. Visitors to the Apple Fest chat about the glorious weather – a sunny weekend after some welcome rain; they gather around the operator of a pole lathe and a scythe sharpener, gaze at a glassblower making honey spurtles, and admire miniature trees laden with ripe fruit.
Indoors, the afternoon sun shines on windowsill arrangements of berries, old man's beard and an autumnal branch of Persian ironwood. People seek identification of their apples, attempt the record for the longest peel, and buy Tamar Valley juice from St Dominic, local honey, books and homemade cakes.
We meet Celia Steven (great-granddaughter of Henry Merryweather who first cultivated and sold the bramley) and talk of her links with and visit to bramley appreciators in Japan. Displays of apples range from little green-and-yellow cider varieties such as blue sweet, Cornish longstem and Captain Broad to the reds of Mrs Bull's and the lumpy Cornish mother – both particularly large and vivid after the warmth and sun of September.
Bere Alston conic, or winter stubbard, is one of many collected by my brother-in-law and sister (James Evans and Mary Martin) who rescued once common varieties from extinction. The breadfruit was found on a single tree more than 35 years ago and pig's snout, described by the farmer near Callington as best for cider, is probably the best in England, recorded in 1934 but lost since 1946. Their collection of 170 varieties is described in A Cornish Pomona.
Outside, the village street leads toward the sparkling expanse of high water in the river Tavy, just before its confluence with the Tamar. Children play and hope for fish in the shallows. Opposite is the burnished canopy of Blaxton Wood. Here, by the beach strewn with wrack and shrivelled leaves, alongside the churchyard, grows a gnarled crab apple tree loaded with bitter yellow fruits and rooted in slate bedrock encrusted with orange lichen.
