Glorious sunshine, so went with Helen and Eva on a whim to Bodmin Moor this afternoon. You can do that sort of thing if you're retired, a working volunteer, un/self-employed! And have use of a kind community member's car!
Not very far down The Atlantic Highway, turn left before Camelford - the wrong left, suddenly a wee bit disconcerting driving down what seemed like the runway of an airstrip (thankfully now disused and delightfully eery) - and off it to the safety of a lane with crazed farm hound pounding directly at us. Back to the right way to a small car park infiltrated by a Bodmin Pony. And onto the moor proper, to Rough Tor, the second highest mount in Cornwall, looking very slight in the surrounding expanse.
Having squelched across the November squelch we somehow took the steepest possible route, the tor's boulders far more challenging than first seemed. Far more beautiful too, these extraordinary shapes and piles not scattered by a devil or giant, but weathered by countless millennia of even wilder forces. Contrasted against richest deep sky blue, they felt warmly solid and roundly right; but seeing the dark sea yonder and the remembering the sign we'd passed for Altarnun, I thought of the terrible fabled wreckers of Jamaica Inn - could this have been the final place of cold defeat?
Walking back down we scrambled, jumped and talked, elated by the vast ancient silence. The sun matched our descent, turning blue to orange to pink, and the lake into shimmering gold.
And then, chancing upon a less radiant piece of dusk, there! starlings! They're back above the plantation where seen last year. Hundreds of them, flying in alignment, out, in, wisping black smoke to broad thin expanse, that way, this way, together, apart. And look! Streams from the horizon there coming to join them, and from the horizon there, across the sun and from behind: great rivers endlessly flowing to an ocean ever larger, rivers of birds whooshing, then still lakes, and then great Atlantic rollers. And yet more streams, stragglers, starlings all joining the most magnificent multitude doing their strange thing. Our mouths hung open, we alone with the ponies and this truly breathtaking phenomenon. We left, as yet more continued to come - the cold and dark drawing us home; but more perhaps, a surfeit of awe.
No photos, I'm afraid - my poor overused camera passed out on first click. I'm half glad: there's no way a digital contraption could ever, or should ever, attempt to do justice to such scenes and sensations.
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