The West Country unrolls down the M4, then M5, under the kind of vintage-yellow hue produced by 35mm camera film where the light’s leaked in. Many fields have been harvested as early as we’ve ever witnessed on this deeply familiar route. Burnt black patches remind us just how flammable the countryside is.
We are exploring places we’ve only passed through before, via a farm-stay in a shepherd’s hut at West Town Farm, Ide. Our parking instructions urge us to allow the farmer to pass in her tractor. The gender reveal is so refreshing I want to cheer. Tenant Kate Sharp farms Hereford-cross beef cattle, Devon closewool and Exmoor horn sheep, as well as some lively Oxford sandy and black pigs, red as the Devon soil itself.
The organic farm, long-established by semi-retiree Andy Bragg, is so close to Exeter, we walk in one day, snacking along the way on cherries and plums overhanging the paths. We spend another day walking the salt-sprayed wall between the sea and railway at Dawlish Warren, which previously I’ve only ever seen, pressed against the window of a Great Western train. Even as we swelter in the heatwave, the destruction caused by winter storms is still visible; Teignmouth’s Great Pier end, collapsed into the sea.
At 20th-century Castle Drogo, we trek towards Sharp Tor, crossing Piddledown Common, where zigzags of bracken leaves suggest basking adders. The heat-shimmered views of Fingle Woods above the Teign Gorge are breathtaking. When we reach the coppery-clear water of the Teign itself, we sink into it, fully-clad, our clothes billowing around us.
When we must leave, it is from a town farm to Village Farm, and its new festival on the fields high above the sea at East Portlemouth. We must squeeze down the narrowest Devon lanes to reach our accommodation (the road along Slapton Sands having been washed away during those same winter storms).
But before we do, the clifftop marquees, sea and sunset are like a painting. Smoke particles from Canadian wildfires, thousands of miles away, scatter the light’s blue wavelengths to show us a halogen-hot red sun. We move like we’re in a dream; all is, briefly, very beautiful.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
