Anemone nemorosa flowers in steep woods below the muddy track, which was once maintained as a carriageway for enjoyment by the Edgcumbes, when out on scenic drives from Cotehele House. The sound of turbulent water carries up from the swollen stream, rushing towards its junction with the tidal Tamar on the Ashburton Bend below Calstock. From the valley side, a mine stack protrudes through trees that colonise waste tips and workings, and there are glimpses of renovated cottages and a little vineyard near the old engine house, converted by the Landmark Trust into a holiday home.
Upstream, by the hamlet of Danescoombe, isolated high walls no longer bound the kitchen garden, established before 1900 by the estate’s gardeners. Instead, sparse rows of narcissi in rough grass indicate later cultivation by tenants until the 1960s. Nearby, the most precipitous market garden plots have reverted to mossy woodland with undergrowth of sprawling daffodils, ivy and winter-flattened ferns.
Trees also encroach on the ruins of an 18th-century paper mill powered by an overshot water-wheel. It made coarse brown paper and millboard (cardboard), used for wrapping and packing produce from the Tamar Valley’s then extensive apple and cherry orchards and soft fruit gardens; documented in 1788, when it was insured for £600, the mill was still working in 1851 “with one vat and a beating engine”, though production ceased in 1857. Rags and hemp would have been transported upriver from Plymouth on sailing barges. These materials, supplemented with local wood shavings and reeds, were then unloaded into horse-drawn carts, and hauled the final mile along the lane inland towards the mill. After soaking in the vat and pounding by the stamps, resultant mashed-up pulp was spread on to frames, pressed and dried into sheets.
Today, in this sheltered wooded enclave, a chiffchaff sings and flits from willow catkins to fresh shoots in bramble thickets in search of insects. Primroses and celandines thrive in damp hedge-banks, to be succeeded by stitchwort, campions, fresh ferns and bluebells. Higher up, trodden horse pastures remain waterlogged; sprayed-off arable fields await a period of dry weather for ploughing, but for now above Honicombe yet more drizzling cloud shrouds Hingston Down.
