Drizzling cloud clears and the summit of Kit Hill becomes visible, so we venture up to its panorama, 600 feet above home. Today the Tamar’s tidal estuary is a silver lake, and a strip of misted sea stretches from Rame towards Whitsand Bay and beyond Bin Down on the south coast. Patches of sun highlight verdant fields fringing orange bracken on Dartmoor to the east and Bodmin Moor to the west. In this warm, damp autumn, the expanse of pastures below our vantage point remains fresh and green.
Up here, turf intersperses with yellow gorse, the faded pinks of bell heather, bramble flowers among rotting blackberries, and loads of haws on gnarled thorns. Rowans are bare, vigorous hollies sport ripening berries, stunted oaks retain burnished leaves, and sour apples cling to hardy trees, perhaps growing from pips spat out by quarry workers.
A fence post forms the strange trunk of a round-topped ivy bush, full of flowers. The hilltop stack was constructed in 1858 – a chimney for the adjoining mine engine house but more ornamental in design than most, at the insistence of the Duchy of Cornwall. Nearby, an earthworks is considered to be the remains of an 18th-century folly, a “Saxon castle”, built to be seen from John Call’s mansion at Whiteford in Stoke Climsland, and portrayed on a Kit Hill Bank pound note.
It’s too windy for easy viewing northwards, so we return down the old toll road, opened in 1928 and charging vehicles a shilling for access to the summit, along with parking, putting green and cafe. Below, beyond the mining area of Silver Valley, St Dominic parish is a patchwork of steep woods and old fields bounded in earth banks, faced with stone and topped in woody growth.
Enclaves, where fields have been amalgamated, are surrounded in regularly flailed hedges and appear as open and smooth as those on Viverdon, close to the dark mass of Sentry Hill wood. That downland was enclosed in the late 19th century just before David Lloyd George’s tax on reclamation – ploughed by teams of horses, drained, and hedged with stones picked off the broken land by displaced miners.
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