Bernard Deacon's Blog, page 13

St Pinnock: the mines open, the mines close

St Pinnock just to the west of Liskeard, is another of those east Cornish parishes touched by the mining boom of the 1840s and 50s. Although on the periphery of the lead mining district nonetheless a quarter of St Pinnock’s adult men in 1861 found employment in local mines, the majority no doubt at Herodsfoot … Continue reading St Pinnock: the mines open, the mines close →

St Neot: leaving for town and new jobs

St Neot is a large parish in east Cornwall stretching from the valley of the River Fowey in the south onto empty moorland as far as Dozmary Pool, to which the Arthurian tale of Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake were attached in the nineteenth century. More prosaically, St Neot shared a little of … Continue reading St Neot: leaving for town and new jobs →

St Minver: Second homes and servants

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 →

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’ →