We all have the odd rare experience so out of keeping with our everyday lives, that when we recall it later it feels a little surreal. I find these moment very precious and like to write them down, having done so I thought you might like to share my most recent.

We sell Earthborn Clay Paint that help old lime pointed and plastered solid walls breath.

Tom and I had a rare Saturday off last weekend giving us two days on the trot, what a treat; (a trade fair had caused us to miss our day off the previous week, so we were playing catch up.) We had taken a paint order that needed to be delivered, and as we have had poor experiences of paint via couriers in the past, we decided to deliver it ourselves and explore an area of Cornwall we have not spent much time in.

Our customer had given very precise instructions on the location of her house saying it is hard to find, and without the help of a milkman, I don’t think we would have. It meant travelling through the most westerly stripe of Cornwall, the bit from St Ives to Lands End which has a very distinct character, and I have found it very difficult to find the right words to describe it. When discussing it with a Cornish friend of mine she volunteered the word primeval. All over Cornwall, it is almost impossible to see the stones in the boundary walls that parcel up the land because hedges grow on top and lush greenery and flowers, which change with the seasons, grow over the rest of it. However, here the fields are small and their boundaries marked by naked stone walls; they look as if they have been there since man first started to farm the land; a treeless landscape, a landscape that is stunted by the merciless winds from the sea. Winds that have help sculpt the coastline after sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean bringing with it the changeable weather Cornwall is known for. The narrow coast road, made muddy from the field equipment that cross it, snakes around farms that have shaped it. Every now and then a rough track will lead from it; it is only by the green wheelie bins on the corners of these tracks do you know it leads to a home or homes.

It was along one of these lanes our directions were to take us. I had presumed by our conversation and my inexperience of the area, that the track would lead to only two houses; but as we travelled along I realised this was a road with a dozen or so homes along it, or what would have passed for as a road hundreds of years ago. (Roads in Cornwall have always been notoriously bad; to this day we do not have a motorway.) As we bumped along we could see houses that looked part of the land, in some distant time they had been moulded up out of the landscape, homes made from what was once the very landscape they now sit. Ancient solid houses of granite and cob with their rag slate roofs, where every slate is a different size; constructed with the largest slates, as big as a man could carry, at the gutters edge to small postcard size ones at the ridge. They may have been added to over the centuries, but have fundamentally changed little. I felt as if I had experienced some kind of time travel, a magical moment where I was allowed to glimpse a time we now call history.