Harvesting of cereals is fast these days, hardly noticed by passersby. Close to home, stubble is glimpsed through gateways off narrow lanes encompassed by rank hedge banks overgrown with honeysuckle. Loaders and trailers race to gather the big round straw bales before rain, and there remain some uncut fields of later, spring-sown, barley.
The rare sight of stooks (cut for thatching) prompt boyhood reminiscences: Jack, my husband, drove the Fordson Major, pulling the binder with his father sitting on the back, and our neighbour, Jeff from Yorkshire, was tasked with catching tossed up sheaves and handing them, butt side out, to the expert rick builder for layering around the central vent.
This afternoon, up on Kit Hill, a circular walk reveals the panorama of undulating fields and woods between Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, part obscured by the sun “drawing water”. Cloud shadows wander across the predominantly pastoral landscape, where patches of sunlight enhance emerald regrowth in hay and silage fields, and the luminous glow of stubble and uncut corn.
Up here, clumps of tall grass, coloured like straw, contrast with the pinks and purples of ling and bell heather. Blackberries are ripe, and a motley assortment of cows with calves grazes placidly among the bracken and gorse that mask granite outcrops and quarrying and mining remains.
On the hill’s northern flank, rowans with scarlet berries appear extra vivid before the hazy blues, greens and blonds of lower land extending towards the Tamar and beyond into Devon. A flock of pipits undulates across the hillside; they perch on a wire and dip off and away southwards, towards the sound of traffic and the plaintive mew of buzzards.
Below lies familiar territory of little valleys and fields interspersed with the larger arable enclosures of Dupath, Westcott and Viverdon Down. Shafts of westering sun glint on St Dominic church tower and also draw attention to land near Metherell, where old varieties of apples are now ripening in the orchard of my sister and brother-in-law, alongside fields of maize awaiting harvest in October.
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