Jug Handle is a staircase of five marine terraces stacked from the beach up to the ridge, and each one was lifted out of the sea about a hundred thousand years before the one below it. Walk two and a half miles inland and you have walked through half a million years of soil making itself, which is a wonderful and quite strange thing to be able to do in a morning.
We’ll start at the bottom on the headland with the grassland and the beach, then climb into closed forest with deep, rich soil under it. On the third terrace the hardpan starts, the ground stops draining, the soil turns acid, and the trees begin to shrink in front of you. By the fourth and fifth you’re in the pygmy forest, standing among trees that are a hundred years old, fully grown and bearing cones, and no taller than you are, some barely past your waist. It’s a gorgeous, eerie, almost alien place, and the detail in it is extraordinary once you slow down and start looking properly.
Five miles round trip on a gentle grade. It’s a lovely walk for families and a fascinating one for anybody who likes knowing why a landscape is the way it is.
