The colours on Caldy Hill are changing to an autumnal palette now. Mushrooms and toadstools blossom from beneath a growing carpet of fallen leaves, and the feisty rustlings of foraging squirrels send showers of pine cones to the damp, peaty ground. The quality of light changes everything, from the soft green-golds filtering through arching branches of oak and rowan, to the hard glitter of silver-greys bouncing off the River Dee. Bees hummed over the last of the purple heather on the summit, and the faerie pond lower down - dry during the summer months - begins to look more marshy as it slowly refills. And on the narrow path, threaded with roots and sandstone rocks, overhung with ripe blackberries and peeling silver birch, lay one tiny lizard, another victim of bicycle wheels, still struggling to crawl away to die beneath the trees.