Walking through the coastal communities of St Minver on the Camel estuary in the dead of night in winter can be unnerving. The place is eerily quiet, not a light to be seen in the empty houses staring out to sea. The parish now exists in a curious limbo – in Cornwall but eerily not … Continue reading St Minver: Second homes and servants
Category: social history
St Michael’s Mount: A life near the ocean wave
Our third St Michael is even smaller than the other two. One of Cornwall’s iconic views and subject of many thousands of paintings and photographs, it’s the only Cornish parish that can comfortably be captured in one camera shot. St Michael’s Mount, where a Benedictine Priory was founded in the 1100s, had been granted in … Continue reading St Michael’s Mount: A life near the ocean wave
St Michael Penkevil: Closing the door on the closed parish
Like the Williamses at Caerhayes, the dominant family at St Michael Penkevil had amassed a fortune from Cornish mining in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The difference was that the Boscawens, raised to the peerage in 1720 as Viscounts and then Lords Falmouth, were an established family and already one of Cornwall’s elite. They … Continue reading St Michael Penkevil: Closing the door on the closed parish
St Michael Caerhays: mock-Gothic brings money problems
The next three parishes in the list share several characteristics in addition to their names. All three were small and owned virtually by a single family, examples of the ‘closed’ parish type, also seen in Cornwall at Boconnoc. All three hosted an impressive great house, home to members of the upper echelons of Cornwall’s landed … Continue reading St Michael Caerhays: mock-Gothic brings money problems
St Mewan: clay captains and class struggle
St Mewan in mid-Cornwall just west of St Austell was a mining parish in 1861 when a half of its men worked in the local tin mines. Another one in eight were clay labourers, this proportion increasing while that of miners shrank over the rest of the century. With the decline of mining, St Mewan … Continue reading St Mewan: clay captains and class struggle
St Merryn: before the tourists arrived
Situated in the north coast of mid-Cornwall, St Merryn is now part of Cornwall’s supposed honeypot tourism periphery, with a high number of second homes and holiday cottages. As much as 60-70 per cent of the housing stock in the coastal areas of the parish had no permanent resident in 2011. We’re still waiting for … Continue reading St Merryn: before the tourists arrived
St Mellion: trees, wooden and family
St Mellion near the Tamar in south-east Cornwall is now home to an Australian-owned up-market golf resort with its hundreds of holiday lodges and periodic controversial planning disputes. In the 1800s it would have been much less manicured. It’s another in what sometimes feels like an endless run of smallish rural parishes that were mainly … Continue reading St Mellion: trees, wooden and family
St Martin in Meneage: the state of agriculture in the ‘Great Depression’
As we saw in the previous blog, farmers in south-east Cornwall were getting along relatively well in the face of the so-called ‘Great Depression’ of British agriculture that began around 1873. Were farmers in the west at St Martin in Meneage equally fortunate? On the Lizard it was reported in 1882 that more farms were … Continue reading St Martin in Meneage: the state of agriculture in the ‘Great Depression’
St Martin by Looe: what could keep them down on the farm?
St Martin by Looe was the mother church of the town of East Looe. By the 1800s East Looe had long been hived off, leaving St Martin as a small rural parish in east Cornwall, where farming employed almost 90 per cent of its men. Farm track near Treveria, where Thomas grew up Only two … Continue reading St Martin by Looe: what could keep them down on the farm?
St Mabyn: a maltster and a vet
Another year and St Mabyn, between Wadebridge and Camelford, is another fairly typical Cornish rural parish. Around two-thirds of its men were employed on the farms of the parish in 1861. Demand for labourers then gradually fell and in consequence the total population of the parish had declined by 12 per cent by 1900, in … Continue reading St Mabyn: a maltster and a vet
Cornish studies resources 