Lockdown 3 Walks: #2: Kit Hill Circular

Our second Lockdown 3 walk in our locality. We hear and obey Mr Wankcock

This one was just up the road from us and was a circumnavigation around the top of Kit Hill. At just over two miles, it's was a stroll to fill a Saturday afternoon gap. And a walk with panoramic 360 views of sea, moors and Plymouth Sound...

...Except for today, when the mist was down and the visibility was poor. OK, not good for one of the senses but excellent for another. The mist deadens sounds and adds another dimension to an otherwise familiar route. Here are a few lines from the poem, Pearl Fog, by Carl Sandburg. They seem to be very appropriate:
"Open the door now.
Go roll up the collar of your coat
To walk in the changing scarf of mist".

The weak and watery winter sun above the stack at South Kit Hill Mine. I like the unknown walkers emerging from the mist.

The top of the Incline, normally an impressive view of a relic of industrial archaeology.

Just a tree with a rather unnaturally green coating of moss. Was it really this colour? I certainly don't remember it like this.

The silent frozen flooded quarry. Turn back the clock, say 150 years, and this would have been a noisy industrial scene with blasting and hammering taking place and chisels skilfully shaping the granite on site.

Judging by the broken pieces we could see, the ice was about an inch thick. Not thick enough for ice-skating.

Another tree in the mist. The conditions seem to accentuate their shape. As Lemm Sissay just said on a TV programme we are watching (Winter Walks on BBC4), bare leaved trees look as if there are rooting in the sky. And, he's right, they do.

Kit Hill has a very important archaeological landscape, with significant prehistoric activity and a rich and highly visible mining heritage. Even apparent holes in the ground are probably part of this, either as a sign of localised working of granite outcrops or, perhaps, an association with early mining efforts. And most of the holes are listed and recorded as archaeological sites in their own right,

Mrs P disappearing into the mist. "Now where's our car?"