Country Diary: Tamar Valley

Between showers a glimmer of midday sun strikes the south-facing sides of the steep Cleave and Radland valleys, and the farmsteads, cottages and converted mill buildings whose occupants no longer depend on the land. From muddy Pensinger Lane, with its shorn hedge banks and vacant pastures, the valleys below appear as an extension of Cotehele's woods converging towards the tidal Tamar. There is no hint of the geometrical patterns, the stripes of different crops that were cultivated in these precipitous market gardens. Reminders of productive times in the smallholdings and water mills are secreted in the valleys' depths where streams rush through silted millponds and submerged tin stamp bases indicate an early blowing mill.

Downhill, Vogus lane is a temporary streambed of eroded blue-grey slate and shoals of leaf mould, edged with frost-flattened ferns and budding primrose. Across Boar's bridge stacks of timber have been cut and dragged from coniferous comfort wood that was originally cleared after the First World War. Now the National Trust plans to return the land to deciduous trees.

Daffodils thrown out on the boundary hedge are still in tight bud, later than last year. On the higher side of the wood bedraggled catkins mingle with shiny holly. Heavy rain has compacted bare soil between fodder beet and washed off shards of china and glass, remnants of the street sweepings from Plymouth, brought upriver a century ago and used as fertilizer. Today, sewage sludge is injected into fields on the flanks of Kit Hill, the northern skyline of these sheltered tributaries.