A rare dry day allows a four-hour walk, from home to Calstock and back. Among the greenery and shorn woody growth of hedge banks are bedraggled daffodils, once thrown out from former market gardens. Verges along the lanes are rutted with tractor wheels; bright drifts of ramsons and dog’s mercury thrive above the mud, and there are fresh primroses and tarnished celandines on sheltered banks.
There’s no stock out on the soggy pastures, apart from small flocks of pregnant ewes and horses at livery in hoof-trodden paddocks. In the recent violent storm, a horse was killed by unexpected lightning, which also damaged phone connections across the parish.
In a steep tributary, the stream from beneath Hingston Down rushes unharnessed past the ruins of a paper mill. Regenerating woodland on the south-facing precipitous slope is scattered with tattered blooms of ‘Helios’, ‘Fortune’, ‘Carlton’ and ‘Princeps’ – relics of intensive cultivation when early narcissi were picked and bunched in galvanised packing sheds, now collapsed under tangled ivy. The later narcissi (‘Croesus’, ‘Sunrise’, ‘White Lady’ and ‘Lucifer’) remain in bud and, with clement weather, may yet produce unblemished flowers among the undergrowth.
At Calstock, the turbulent river swirls brown beneath the railway viaduct, which carried a succession of minerals and produce upcountry, before its present-day use by commuters and tourists. Downstream, the sunny shoreside road passes below terraced houses and modern detached dwellings on former horticultural and glasshouse sites. Cavernous lime kilns drip with water, and stalactites hang from the archway of the incline railway that used to lower wagons of ore and stone towards quays and awaiting river barges.
Our way returns up the steep, shady side of the Danescombe Valley, where bluebell and woodrush emerge between flattened hard ferns and leaf mould of oak and sweet chestnut. Uphill, from weedy stubble near the isolated folly tower of Cotehele, the landmark clump of beech near home is within sight; still to come is Comfort Wood, Boar’s Bridge across the racing millstream and, finally, the overgrown slopes of Radland Valley.
But first, a stroll through Newton’s restored meadow with its maturing avenue of local-variety fruiting cherries, and hopes for spectacular blossom in April and luscious fruit in July.
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