Tree surgeons in St Agnes, Mount Hawke and Porthtowan

St Agnes Beacon rises to over six hundred feet straight out of the sea, and the village sits in the valley on its landward side, sheltered from the worst of the north westerlies and mild enough to grow real trees. The old village along Vicarage Road, Churchtown, Peterville and the streets of the Stippy Stappy terraces has mature gardens with sycamores, beeches, evergreen oaks and the odd big conifer, and the valley running down to Trevaunance Cove is wooded with oak, ash, willow and sycamore. This is where most of the village's tree work is, and it is the usual mix: reductions and dead wooding on the big garden trees, removals where one has outgrown a cottage plot, and storm damage after a blow.

Above the village the ground is Wheal Coates, Wheal Kitty, Blue Hills and the old workings along the cliffs to Chapel Porth and Porthtowan, all of it within the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site and much of it National Trust. Trees here are gorse and thorn on spoil, willow in the wet hollows and the occasional sycamore that has found shelter behind a wall. Clearing scrub off mining ground for a paddock or a building plot comes with the checks for shafts and adits, for bats in the old buildings, and for the heritage designations, and we walk every site before we bring a machine onto it.

Inland the villages of Mount Hawke, Mithian, Trevellas and Blackwater sit on the plateau between the coast and the A30, exposed to every wind and planted with the shelter belts and estate trees that go with that. Leylandii hedges grown to thirty feet, poplar screens along the edges of the newer estates at Mount Hawke, shelter belts of sycamore and pine around the farms and the airfield at Trevellas, and Cornish hedges thick with thorn and gorse. The work is reductions, removals, stump grinding and hedge work, and because Chiverton is a few minutes away, it is easy to fit in.

Porthtowan is a surf beach in a steep valley, and the valley behind it up to Mount Hawke is wooded, wet and full of self sown sycamore and willow that hang over the lane and the houses. Ash dieback is in the hedgerows here as everywhere. After a storm the calls from the valley bottom are about trees across the road and the stream, and with the digger and the lorry we can clear a lane in a morning.

St Agnes and the villages around it are close and we are there most weeks, so quoting visits are quick to arrange. The free tree health check covers TR5, and for the big garden trees in the village and the shelter belts on the plateau it is well worth using before the autumn.