I moved to the Tamar Valley about 35 years ago. The area is both an AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and has many SSI’s, Sites of Scientific Interest. For a long while I had a job that required me to travel through the length and breadth of the region. An area stretching from the North Devon and North Cornwall coast down to Plymouth on the South coast.

Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.

For this reason I am very familiar with every town and many villages in the area. Some of them are not even that close time-wise because the roads are not the quickest. Exploring an area by working was fascinating because like a television anthropologist I met the people of the region. Although, thank goodness, I didn’t need to creep around in hiking gear followed by a camera operator and a translator. ( Sometimes a translator would have been very useful)

I’ve not been as diligent with attractions but I am fairly confident that I have not missed anything that would have embellished my life indelibly.

As we edge out of January there is an accidental attraction. Roadsides throughout the Valley start to sprout daffodils. A lovely consequence of World War II. The Tamar Valley used to grow millions of daffodils to supply the rest of Britain with early cut flowers. During the war the fields were needed to grow food and the bulbs were tossed into the hedgerows. For the next three months the descendants of these discarded bulbs will brighten our journeys.