Granite boulders furred with moss, beech and oak closing overhead, and somewhere below you the sound of water running in a stone channel built by people who wanted it to work, not to look pretty. The Luxulyan Valley, tucked between Par, Lostwithiel and St Austell in mid Cornwall, is one of those places where industrial history and woodland have grown into each other so completely that it is hard to tell where one ends.
Most of what you see was the work of Joseph Treffry, a mine owner and entrepreneur who in the 1830s and 1840s set about connecting his mines and the china clay country above to his new harbour at Par. He built leats to carry water, an inclined plane to haul wagons up the steep side, and the great Treffry Viaduct, a long granite bridge that carried both a tramway and a water channel across the valley on the same arches. It is now part of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site, and the railway from Par to Newquay still threads through the bottom of the valley.
On a motorcycle this is lane country, and Cornish lanes deserve respect. They are single track for long stretches, sunk between high earth hedges topped with gorse and foxgloves, with grass and gravel up the middle and tractors appearing round blind corners at exactly the wrong moment. Go slowly, use the passing places, and keep a finger on the brake. The reward is a sequence of shaded dips and climbs where the air turns cool and smells of wet stone and wild garlic in spring. Parking near Ponts Mill at the lower end lets you walk up beside the canal and the river to the viaduct.
Nature has done well out of industrial neglect. Ferns, liverworts and lichens love the humid air, and the old inclines and leats are now green tunnels. Buzzards hang over the clay country above, where the spoil heaps around St Austell earned the nickname of the Cornish Alps. The Eden Project sits in a former clay pit only a few kilometres away if you want to see what became of one of them.
Par and St Austell both have fuel, supermarkets and cafés, and Lostwithiel, the old stannary town on the River Fowey with Restormel Castle above it, is a nicer place to stop for a pasty and a pot of tea. In summer the main roads around St Austell clog with holiday traffic, so mornings and late afternoons are kinder.