This walk follows the River Allen through land owned by the National Trust. Wild garlic decorates the ground in profusion. The river is about 20 metres wide and rushes over multitudinous rocks and stones. A suspension bridge crosses it, shifting underfoot in a way that is slightly unnerving. The path on this eastern bank is still wet with yesterday’s rain. Rocky outcrops stand above it, mosses clinging to them. Green anarchy reigns, what with the mosses, new spring leaves, and burgeoning ferns spilling out of dark, dank spots.

These were once the grounds of Ridley Hall, and have a landscaped character. On a summer weekend, it would be crowded, but today just a few walkers exercise their dogs over the first mile or so. Otherwise, it seems like your own territory, albeit as a small-scale time share. Raven Crag towers thirty metres, opposite a sharp bend in the river where the valley floor widens and bluebells chime silently. Beyond the new bridge at Plankey Mill, the path leads through fields of daisies and buttercups. It follows a depression, bringing your eyesight on a level with them and providing a buttercups’ perspective on the world.

The tall grass soaks your trousers and boots with yesterday’s rain. A low tree stump has provided a squirrel with a table on which to extract the seeds from several pinecones, discarded husks lying scattered over it. The waters cut a deep defile through Staward Gorge, where there remain traces of woodland more than 400 years old and, according to an information board, Britain’s most northerly population of dormice.

The path widens towards the Cupola Bridge, the arches of which provide sport for twenty black-headed gulls, which swoop beneath them, effortlessly gulping midges that swarm there in their thousands.