Beneath the Cadson Bury hillfort, the River Lynher rushes past a tangle of fallen trees, boggy pools, rivulets, and debris cast up into overhanging branches. Beside flowering gorse bushes, steep rabbit-grazed turf leads up to even steeper ramparts edging the fort. From these prehistoric defences, all-round views take in the woodland on the other side of the river – a purplish, brown and grey canopy of budding alder and lichen-encrusted oak twigs, stretching downstream past Newton Ferrers, and towards the medieval clapper bridge at Pillaton. To the west, Caradon Hill and Sharp Tor mark the skyline of Bodmin Moor, rising above upper reaches of the Lynher.
There, near Stara bridge, is a favourite place, dating from childhood when my younger sister and I stayed with our paternal grandparents. At the hamlet of Darley, close to Notter Tor with its overgrown quarries and mine shafts, overlooked by the shadowy profile of Cheesewring quarry, my grandfather cultivated a garden with fruit and vegetables, milked two South Devon cows, kept hens and rotated a few bullocks in little stony pastures. Occasionally he rode towards the moor on his chestnut mare, Gaiety. Until a borehole was divined and installed, the house was plumbed with rainwater collected from the roof; we helped carry pitchers and covered buckets of drinking water pumped from a nearby well.
Familiar narrow lanes, edged in granite hedge banks clothed in dripping mosses, pennywort and ferns, wind downhill. Before the onset of this recent dry spell, these ways ran as streams, channelling excessive run-off and detritus from enlarged and waterlogged fields towards the river, unusually high and swollen with water from the eastern side of the moor.
Towards Bearah, a working quarry that still cuts and dresses granite for restoration projects, a rough access track passes huge, grounded boulders coated in bright green moss; groves of stunted oaks grow among jumbles of worked stone that shield these sturdy trees from nibbling sheep, and swags of bearded lichen drape gnarled thorns, thriving in the pure damp air. By mid-afternoon the clouds clear and the lowering sun highlights a group of tors perched above the quarry. A north wind presages the coming of frost and eventual hardening of sodden ground.
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