On the northern flank of Kit Hill, above the route of the railway that curved towards the terminus at Kelly Bray, thickets and brambly scrub clothe the stony hillside. Fresh oak leaves of varied colours mingle with pale green rowan and birch, hawthorn that’s about to burst into flower, and apple trees in their pink blossom.
Bluebells drift between boulders and buckler ferns uncurl in the shade. Up here the melodious song of willow warblers still heralds summer but sadly they are no longer heard near home.
Now a country park, this hill was for centuries a source of moorstone used for buildings in nearby parishes. Later, from the 1800s, a quarry near the summit specialised in providing granite for civil engineering. Stone was blasted from the bedrock and then cut, shaped and polished on site. Finished blocks were dispatched to London, for use in bridges, the Thames embankment and the docks, and also exported as far as Guernsey, Gibraltar and Singapore.
The first stage of the journey, towards water transport along the tidal Tamar and across the sea, was in trucks down an incline to the railway, 100 metres below. It is now a steep, grassy, footpath edged in huge piles of discarded granite overgrown with mosses and bushes.
A man walks two rottweilers uphill from the car park and, halfway up, a family pause for breath and gaze north across the panorama of pastures, winter corn marked with crop spray tramlines, gaudy enclaves of oilseed rape, and the shimmer of plastic covered fields.
The south side of the hill is exposed, treeless. Old mine workings are visible between the yellow gorse, orange-tinged clumps of whortleberry, and sparse grasses where skylarks sing overhead.
The familiar territory of home is easy to pick out from here – the church tower of St Dominic, the beech clump where a bough blew off in last week’s gale, the woodland of Radland valley where historic plots of Poeticus narcissi are now overwhelmed by bluebells and ferns. The plastic on the fields at Metherell is already punctured with spears of maize.
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