For sale, beside a stack of 8ft long straw bales at Dupath, are Christmas trees with silver-tinged, non-drop, needles. Later in the week Norway spruce will be cut from the farm’s own plantation and sold at a cheaper price. On Christmas day the farmer’s family will host a community lunch in their converted barn restaurant.
Nearby, a yard shelters Friesian calves with access to automatic feeders, and, in another wide-span building, a new straw-spreading machine distributes bedding around two-year-old bullocks, an indoor herd fed on silage.
A holy well adjoins the farmyard. Built by the canons of St Germans in 1510 the little oratory and baptistery are constructed entirely of granite with block walls. There’s an arch supporting the slabs of the steep gabled roof, a bellcote-like turret, crocketed pinnacles and a shallow bath filled by a trickle of spring water. Kit Hill overlooks this building set on the boundary between Callington and St Dominick parishes and now managed by the Cornwall Heritage Trust.
On this dull afternoon no sunshine enlivens the greens and greys of the fields and leafless trees around the defunct mines in Silver Valley, but aloft in a scrap of blue sky sun glints on a plane going east.
West of the farm a path leads uphill between banks topped with ash, oak and sycamore, and where buckler, male, and soft shield ferns, remain green and sturdy, untouched by frost.
Up in the wind, on Balston Down, thickets of stunted blackthorn and clumps of hazel seclude a derelict quarry, almost filled with water smothered in duckweed. This rocky outcrop was valued in prehistoric times and has been identified as a source for the greenstone axe-heads found in the West Country. Further along the ridge, nothing remains of the concrete hut and bunker, once used by the Royal Observer Corps as a monitoring station for possible nuclear fallout.
Now, louring cloud masks the long views towards Plymouth and Bodmin Moor. In the gloom, cars speed homewards along the A388 past downland hedges of tall gorse covered in luminous yellow flowers.
