This is Pearce’s Shaft as anyone who takes note of what I do here will know – it’s been featured several times.

Today’s story is one brimming with happiness and joy.

We had a phone call this morning, when we were still in our dressing gowns, from Janet and John saying ‘please take us to see South Caradon’. Well, we’d been booked up but were unexpectedly free because our little scampers, Fin and Greg were both ‘projectile vomiting’ and so they’d all opted out (probably just as well) of meeting them for a walk on the beach today. Of course, with the day now free, why would we say anything other than ‘Yes’.

I must say, that although I know Janet really well, I know John barely at all and so it has been a great delight to discover he’s as batty (or as I managed to say earlier, boring…..though I meant it in the BEST possible way) as us. I (as anyone who reads this regularly will know already) LOVE people who love their subject. The best bit about John’s love of his subject is that it rides happily along the same track as our subject. He was completely thrilled to find we have two mineral lodes and an adit running across our land!

This place is our passion and its geology and heritage are what we’re learning about. He has a passion for geology and mining. I think this is a friendship made in heaven. In fact, had the weather been less scorching, I reckon we’d have been on that hillside for the whole day……er, you’re telling me we were? Oh yes, so we were.

We set off at 2pm (that’s not all day) and walked ‘til 6pm. Then we had an hour and a half off then we walked again from 7.30pm to 9.40pm. I now have sore feet. VERY sore feet.

We walked through South Caradon, East Caradon, past Wheal Jenkin, Marke Valley, Phoenix United, West Caradon and Wheal Agar, not to mention the quarry and the railway (ex). John was thrilled with it all and so were we to have a companion with a love of this in his eye and telling us so much that we didn’t know. We examined the crystals formed in the granite and learned how slowly it cooled through the length of the crystals. We learned how granite pops up like a fist through the earth’s surface. We learned what iron ore, quartz and a whole lot of other things looked like.

I learned, much to my dismay as I pick up rocks and take them home routinely while we’re walking, that some of the rocks you pick up are deadly and I don’t mean that you can get coshed over the head with one, I mean they have arsenic on them. I saw it with my own eyes. I now know which ones to avoid!

Then, while we were supping an ale at the pub on the way home, we realised that David hadn’t got Archie’s super-dooper retractable but non-burn (dog owners will know the sort of thing I mean) lead. We all knew where it was. It was lying on a rock, while DM took a photo. We’d all registered that it was there, none of us had thought to check it was no longer there when we left the spot. The spot was Pearce’s Shaft. That was bad luck.

That’s how we ended up back there in the late evening light. We walked all the way back there to get it and luckily for DM it was there! (Otherwise, I’d have taken the short, training lead that had sufficed for Arch as we went up the road this evening and strangled him with it – yep, I’d have become a murderess!)

Clearly we deserved our reward from this second trip and we got it with watching this hot air balloon and land in a field just beyond the moor. As it sank, I quickly ran to a spot where Pearce’s Shaft’s Engine House would frame its remains and I got my pic….cool! That was good luck.

A strange abstract image was my thing last year!