There has been a flurry of activity on the moor in the last couple of years. I’m not sure whether the chicken came first or the egg in as much as I’m not sure whether our recently acquired World Heritage status has meant that it’s easier to attract funding for maintenance/improvements or whether the money needed to be promised in order to achieve it. Either way, there have been teams of stonemasons and other workers stabilising the crumbling buildings to prevent their further decline and a few improvements have also been done.

We’ve spoken to a team of stonemasons at Silver Hill mine building, who said their role was not to rebuild, simply to prevent the building from falling into the ground. Basically they’ve replaced ancient mortar with new in order to stop the granite blocks from falling off. We think that where they’ve been able to identify specific stones that have fallen off, they’ve put them back as well. Other workers have opened up two tunnels that had long been closed by earth, rubble and other detritus. This is one of them. You can’t actually go into the tunnel because there is a new metal gate across the front to prevent entry but you can see in – this is the view now and this is what it used to look like in 2004. It’s fascinating in a range of ways, not least that the granite blocks that make up its arched roof seem to be floating in the air with nothing to prevent them from crashing down to earth. They don’t though. In fact, they’ve been there making this lovely arch for around 200 years and it’s good to see this bit of (probably) early Victorian architecture revealed once again to anyone intrepid enough to be out exploring this site.

This morning, DM offered me the choice of what we did for the day as it’s my birthday. We had one important meeting to attend, but other than that it was up to me where we went and what we did…within the boundary of can’t cost any money. So I chose one of our “standard” walks but a long one – roughly four miles and two hours of walking. Basically we circumnavigated Caradon Hill and this gave us the opportunity to do four key things:

1. Exercise for us
2. Exercise for the dogs
3. Check on the progress of the building work on the hill
4. Look for Euphrasia vigursii
We achieved all four things! Now though, I ache – I feel as though just by standing up I’m doing a phenomenal feat of gravity defying myself! I must do more of this walking stuff. We’ve got really out of the habit of anything above a couple of miles of late and it’s time to crank up the distances again.