From North Hill village, drab hedge banks are dominated by faded ferns, rotting blackberries, dull leaves and sycamore keys. Yet a spell of afternoon sunshine picks out the scarlet berries of honeysuckle and enhances the verdancy of pastures beside the glittering Lynher, swollen after days of rain.
Across the river, steep woods edge the eastern side of Bodmin Moor; in the prevailing shade, spirals of gnats dance above upright fronds of buckler and male ferns, lit by sunbeams. Emerald moss-shrouded gateposts, stoned-up walls, tall tree trunks and fallen wood host pennywort seedlings and polypody ferns that thrive in the damp atmosphere. Shoals of leaves, beechmast and sparkling growan (decomposed granite) have been washed down the stony track and, from below, we hear the sound of the Withey Brook, rushing over the waterfall and towards the local hydroelectric power plant.
Out of the woods, some 300 feet above river level, sun lightens Allabury, a prehistoric “round” – an enclosed farming settlement – where a ring of oak grows on the old rampart and a dozen red admirals flutter about sun-warmed ivy flowers. Above this spur of land, the rocky summit of Hawk’s Tor (329 metres) is fringed by rough grazing with bare rowans and a few thickets of invasive Rhododendron ponticum.
A suckler herd of hardy cattle tramples paths through the precarious stones, masked in swaths of brown bracken and clumps of gold-flowering gorse, to reach favoured patches of smooth green turf interspersed with huge, part-submerged boulders growing lichens, stunted ling and whortleberry. Ahead, rising above the burnished wetness of Tresellern Marsh and opposite overgrown remains of medieval settlements, Trewortha Tor and King Arthur’s Bed are silhouetted against the south-western sky, and in the distance the crest of Brown Willy breaks the skyline.
Around Hawk’s Tor, on the southern flank facing Twelve Men’s Moor and Kilmar, masses of crimson haws catch the light, growing thickly on thorns festooned in bearded lichen. Far off to the east, Dartmoor appears palest blue and pink in the declining afternoon sun; as we descend into the darkening valley it disappears from view, to be replaced lower down by a view of Kit Hill, the intervening outcrop of granite near home in the Tamar Valley.
