Ooh, now there's a thing! I've been happily scanning the photos of our Sidmouth-based holiday and they suddenly run out! So I must have cocked up my filing system some time in 1993! Which means that, unless this series of entries comes to an abrupt halt with this one, I've got to go searching for the rest of the negatives from that holiday which has yet to take in Torquay, Paignton and Beer. No... the town, not the drink! The drink is involved of course in every holiday at ...er... one point or another... but I meant Beer, the south coast olde-worlde village.
Anyway, it is Tuesday 10 August 1993 and we are at the once-lost village and now living musem of Morwellham Quay. The water wheel has been moved out into the open in the village and is an over rather than under flow water wheel. Which means it wasn't the stream flowing underneath that turned it but the diverted flow of water spilling over the top of it, the weight of the water then turning the wheel in the direction of the flow from the top rather than the bottom.
I'm not sure where the wheel came from. Certainly the copper mine which was the reason for the village's existence would need pumping out continuously to avoid it flooding. We went on the narrow-gauge train down the mine and there was at least one spot where we got heavily dripped on! The conditions that the miners endured back in - well - any point in time really, doesn't bear thinking about, with either noisy machinery, explosives, or wrist-wrecking constant chipping at rock walls with deer antlers for a pickaxe. By the time compressed air jack hammers came in, a miner was lucky not to be totally deaf after a year down the mine.
The houses for the miners would have been basic, small and probably housing an extended family of parents, children and grandparents. Each cottage probably had a family manure pile that in farming communities would be loaded onto a cart after a good rotting for a year or so, or perhaps here just taken down to the nearest stream or the River Tamar itself. Most towns had a stream called the "Shit Creek" and it's where our saying for anyone in unfortunate circumstances being "Up Shit Creek" comes from.
The cart stands outside the back of a row of workshops each depicting a different craft. There was a smithy, a cooper's workshop (a cooper made barrels - so if your name is Cooper, you now know what your ancestor did for a living), a carpenter's workshop and so on.
We made our way down to the dock. In the background can be seen an elongated trestle. It is actually a railway line. Ore from the mine would be sent down to the dock to be loaded onto ships or barges and in the days before steam power it was built as a gravity powered railway. The entrance to the mine is on a cliff at the side of the river so there was plenty of gradient to send simple trucks. Too much gradient to have it finish at ground height as the trucks would be travelling too fast to stop, so they arrived on the trestles and were unloaded there. The ore was taken to South Wales for smelting.
The ship is the Garlandstone, a gaff-rigged ketch, launched in 1909. She carried a crew of three, had eight sails and carried a cargo of 100 tons. She was brought to Morwellham in 1987.
There were not many people around so I settled myself to do a sketch of a ketch. The photos will allow for those who wish to gloat over the inaccuracies! There will be a few to find I'm sure! On board there were displays of pulleys with sandbags attached so that visitors could assess the effectiveness of single, double and multi pulley systems.
Exhausted by my strenuous effort at drawing, I take a well-earned rest on the steps of a caravan. "Take me back to the village," I plead. But alas... no horse...
A solution is found!
We arrive back at the village shops where a top-hatted gent looks on as Miss Franny takes a long slurp from the nearby trough after pulling the caravan up the slope. He was tipping his topper at all the ladies who passed. The police weren't as vigilant in those days...
On the way back to the campsite we stopped off at Exmouth for a short while. The day had started out a bit dull and cloudy but was ending with warmth and sunshine.
So now I must find my other negatives or carry on with my previous scans of the photo prints. Ho hum, I do enjoy a good rummage in the attic...
In fact, this is where this set of articles originally written in April 2009 finished. I never did find those negatives. But now in 2023 I have been going through older posts on this blog and bringing them up to date, adding more photos (this article originally had just three photographs - well, two and the sketch) and adding index pages as I sort out the mish-mash of posts that got lost or separated by other posts. In this case they rest of the posts of this holiday will be separated by a mere 14 years...
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