The soft blue skies lift us up onto the moors today. We wander along the glossy banks of the stream, between moss covered hedgerows studded with primroses and pennywort, up, up, up and out onto the wide blasted heaths above the cliffs. The heather is not yet in flower, it rises in shocks of grey from the twisting horizontal stems of gorse. A line of sea shines in a sweeping crescent below the Carn, foreshortening the world, making villages merge; skeletal frames of old mine workings etched black against a silver horizon.

The granite of the Carn is warm in the sunshine. It is also surprisingly smooth as we, each of us, are overcome by the primal urge to climb higher. Wedging boots in crevices and hoisting ourselves up the white and green face of the towering rocks. I pause halfway up to admire the clustered pink rosettes of stonecrop basking in the sun, elevated above the heavy tread of human or beast. Only the skylarks and the buzzards are above us; one invisible in the blue, a distant undulating song; the other a silent dark silhouette, circling on the thermals between here and the sea.

Beside the stone circle, below the Carn, a pair of Canada geese drift in silent companionship on a moorland pool. The water is coppery and clear, the surface carpeted in the greens and whites of the Water Hawthorn which seems to have colonised this remote Cornish oasis. The pond has its own island, and we talk of how we will return in the summer, already dreaming of ice-cold golden swims.

Perhaps the greatest thing about reaching the top of the world is that the walk home is always downhill. The afternoon is waning as we dawdle down the bridleways that lead us back to civilisation. We pause to listen to a stonechat who shouts at us in annoyance, and spend quite some time staring at a yellow mound of grass, convinced we are actually staring out an unblinking adder.

Slowly, slowly we come back down to the world we left behind and wend our way along the lanes that smell like freshly cut grass into the gentlest Spring evening.