Penryn makes a March appearance this year - probably its final Seasonal Area role. The Cornish town is located on a ridge running eastwards and downwards between two valleys, both with small streams at the bottom. That to the south features a string of reservoirs before coming down through College Wood, while to the north a shorter valley cuts deeply down through the hillside and an area described by the local road name as Tremough Dell. (Dells are popular in Cornwall, describing as they do small wooded valleys with little streams at the bottom).

The southern valley remains predominantly wooded, though with some farmland - particularly on the south side. There has been minimal housing development. The northern valley, by contrast, has been occupied by some of Penryn's nicer and more secluded properties, somehow managing to overcome being overlooked by the local road (and its double-deck buses) to appear as discrete properties nestling amongst the trees. The most notable is a strange 1930s concrete affair, painted white and beautifully curved, which squats like some alien intrusion in the centre of this view and attracts much intrigued, though admiring, comment from the students who walk past this viewpoint on their way into the town and its railway station.

The dell was once spanned at its eastern end, off to the right of this picture, by Penryn Viaduct - a short affair with stone piers supporting fans of wooden struts which in turn supported the timber deck on which the rails were laid. Additional seclusion was provided when in the 1920s the Great Western Railway replaced this viaduct with a high embankment and put the stream in a culvert. Now the dell has no obvious view out onto the world and instead exists as a little depression. Rail passengers cannot see it, since the embankment has been allowed to succumb to the march of a highly intrusive force known as "trees".