Most modern employment classifications treat mining and quarrying as a single economic sector. So how many more workers did clay extraction and quarrying add to the mining and quarrying sector in 1861? The answer is not that many when compared with the dominant mining for copper, tin, lead and other minerals. While metal mines accounted … Continue reading Digging for riches: not just miners but quarriers
Category: quarrying
Falmouth: port and people
Falmouth was, and is, different, often cited as the atypical Cornish town. More than any other place in Cornwall, Falmouth’s horizons seem to look outwards rather than inwards. It emerged late, a new town of the seventeenth century nestling on the sheltered western side of the Fal estuary and quickly elbowing aside its older medieval … Continue reading Falmouth: port and people
Cautious conclusions from Camelford
As members of homo sapiens (purportedly), we like to impose patterns on the world around us. Often, however, the information available mean that those patterns exist in our minds rather than in the world around us. So it could be with the pattern of migration from the Camelford Registration District (RD) in the later nineteenth … Continue reading Cautious conclusions from Camelford
Trevalga: unspoilt haven or development opportunity?
Unlike Cornwall’s other tiny tre- parishes, Trevalga is on the north coast, wedged between the small settlements of Boscastle and Tintagel. The farms of this parish had been neatly distributed across the hills and valleys leading inland by Cornwall’s early medieval inhabitants. Meanwhile, its small church and churchtown are hunched down nearer the forbidding cliffs … Continue reading Trevalga: unspoilt haven or development opportunity?