Following restorative showers and cooler temperatures, encroaching greenery narrows lanes, where leafy shrubs on hedge-banks sprout new growth. Ferns, particularly bracken, overwhelm seeding bluebell and campion, flower spikes of pennywort, and foxglove now past its best. Tendrils of bryony, bedstraw and bramble scramble for light and dog roses are already fading. The first purplish-blue of tufted vetch stands out from the verdure, and the scent of honeysuckle and elderflower draws attention to topmost blooms.
Shorn sheep and their fattening lambs no longer seek the shadiest hedges; a farmer reports shearing of his 220 ewes by the two regular specialists in three hours – with the fastest time of just 50 seconds. Before significant rainfall, topping (cutting back coarse, ungrazed vegetation) in the pasture opposite home encourages thicker growth of grass for the South Devon yearlings, moved regularly to avoid overgrazing of each enclosure. In the warmth of May and early June they have thrived, with regular rest times, chewing the cud, and growing noticeably beefier as the weeks go by.
After an unusually dull day, the sky clears from the north-west. Early evening sun haloes crowns of hedgerow trees bounding fields beneath the hazy blueness of Hingston Down, already greening up after this year’s early hay cut. This direction of sunlight speaks of the approach of midsummer as we set out, later than usual, on one of our regular walks, venturing eastwards towards the cleft of Danescombe that joins the Tamar. There, former market gardens that grew strawberries and daffodils on sheltered slopes are overcome with regenerated woodland. Ubiquitous bramble flowers promise a good crop of blackberries, emerging between invasive bracken, through willow scrub on slopes cleared of conifers, and in the shade of older trees that mask the ruins of a paper mill, mine dumps and adits burrowed into this precipitous valley.
Our path emerges from the gloomy woods to cross dried-up grass stalks, catching the evening light; upslope peeps the Prospect Tower, set against azure sky streaked with cirrus portending more rain. This three-sided 18th-century folly may have been built so that the Edgcumbe family of Cotehele House could signal towards Mount Edgcumbe, miles away downriver on the Rame peninsula. For us, home ground comes into sight – just two miles as the crow flies.
