Morwellham Quay Part 2

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...

Return to Sidmouth and Devon Holiday 1993 Index Page

Morwellham Quay Part One

Tuesday 10 August 1993. Morwellham is a village on the north side of the River Tamar, which places it in Devon not far from the town of Tavistock. Its livelihood and the reason for its existence was a copper mine, The George and Charlotte, named after the King and Queen who were on the throne at the time of its sinking. Er... that's the sinking of the mine shaft, meaning the digging of it, not that it sunk into the river...

Anyway at some point the copper in the mine ran out and the villagers ran out not long afterwards. Morwellham became a ghost town and the weeds took over until they in turn were taken over by thicker shrubbery and bracken. And that's how it stayed until the 1960s when the village was rediscovered and cleaned up. They found a young girl fast asleep on a bed next to a spinning wheel. She had been there so long that there was no-one who even knew her, let alone be in love with her, so sadly there was no true love's first kiss and instead she woke with a jolt and said "'Ere!!! Wot you all doin' in me bedroom?" The village became a living museum with actors and staff in period costume and a narrow-gauge train ride down into the copper mine and with a historic ship in the Great Dock and nature trails around the countryside.

The village was on the doorstep of the estate of the Duke of Bedford who, being fond of a turn in his horse-drawn carriage, had a carriage ride built through the countryside close to Morwellham.

We clambered into a waiting carriage and waited for the Duke to take us up and down his drive and perhaps a spot of tiffin and the chance to bag a couple of peasants. "We'll give you a chance - we'll count up to two and then here we come!"

The Duke had to go for a lie down with a bottle of port after his exertions and we found ourselves being driven by a young lady with a quoite gaaargeous aahccent! Here the gang are enjoying the gentle clip clop of the horse's hooves as the carriage makes it's way along his Grace's drive. We learned that the village name was pronounced almost as two words - "Morwell" with the accent on the first syllable, followed by a tiny pause before the "ham".

The River Tamar, seen from the pathway to the George and Charlotte Copper Mine. Once the mine was closed the villagers had to move elsewhere to look for work and the village died. The dock and houses were abandoned and became overgrown until the 1960s when work started on restoring the village as a living museum.

We had a peek in all the tradesmen workshops and all in all had a great day out! There's still a bit to see - the dock with a masted barque, a huge water wheel and other bits, so there will be a second article to come before we leave Morwellham.

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Chun Castle

Wednesday 7 August 1996. The Cornwall holiday continues... We split up for the day, Mum and Dad coming with Fran and myself round some stone circles and hill forts whilst the rest went to a theme park. We drove round the coast past Zennor where a legend says, a mermaid was so enchanted by the sound of a chorister's voice from the church that she enticed him into the sea and he lived with her wrinkly ever after from then on.

This is Chun Castle, (it's pronounced "Choon"), an Iron Age hillfort. At one point you could walk from the east of Britain to the Netherlands, or Germany but Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe when the last ice age melted and formed the North Sea. Whilst the first cities were being built in the middle east the British were still living in stick and mud huts in fortified circles on the tops of hills. The fort dates from around 300-200 BCE and has two rings of walls and a ditch surrounding it.

The gorse was in abundance - the farmer on whose land we parked told me the weather "...has been very good for the shrubs this year. You'll have to mind it!" The gorse looks lovely from a distance. Close up it has small two inch branches covered in spine like leaves which just then were pricking through trousers and skirts and up to shirts and tops as the bushes were anything up to 3 feet tall! Mum gave up in the face of the gorse (well it came farther up on her than anyone else as she's a bit smaller than the rest of us!) and she went back to sit in the car whilst we explored. The photo shows a clearing in the centre of the fort with the remains of what I first took to be someone's hearth, but which has been described as an iron or tin smelting furnace. Slag heaps of both metals were found within the fort.

Chun Castle boasts the foundations of much of its surrounding defensive wall, now reduced to what looks like a pile of rubble in the shape of a huge ring. It's still around five feet in height although originally it would have been around four times that size. It has a couple of gateposts still standing. The hillfort is in a superb position on the Lands End peninsula and you can see both the south and west coasts from its wall which afforded its residents some amount of warning should an enemy appear.

In a clearing in the gorse which now covers most of the interior, the castle's well, choked with fallen stone can be seen. A set of stone stairs led down to the water which still finds its way into the well even now. It was still used by locals upto c1940. Some sources suggest that locals thought it would give them perpetual youth. If so there must have been some sort of mass exodus from the area as there are definately not two and a half to three thousand years worth of youths living nearby... Also clearly visible from the fort are the remains of a couple of the distinctive engine houses of Cornish tin mines.

A couple of gate posts or markers stood along the path into the fort. A further post from the outer wall stands behind my viewpoint.

It can be seen in this view, just behind the only other person we saw that morning at Chun. At some point the layout of the entrance was changed to create a dog's leg turn between the two gates in the outer and inner walls, and the fort has been described as being far more advanced in its military design than other forts of the same period.

The gatepost from the outer wall. Fran and Dad decided to go back and keep Mum company as we had been mooching around for quite a while and she may have been wondering if we'd fallen down the well and just run off like the children we may have become... Meanwhile I have one more thing to see which will take me back in time a further two to three thousand years from the hillfort. But that, as a quizmaster would say just before a TV break, is why you will come back tomorrow - won't you?

Return to Cormwall 1996 Holiday Index