Industrial Devolution

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We have come to a part of Cornwall that is clearly more remote than the North Coast, based on the much lower ‘tourist-to-local’ ratio.  Here, it is a safe bet that nearly anyone you meet is a resident.  We are in the middle of the peninsula, about 40 miles further west than Port Isaac, nestled down in a stone cottage by a stream with a medieval bridge over it.  It features exposed wood beams over doors and windows, slate floor in the kitchen, a giant clawfoot bathtub and two of the doors are from the notorious Bodmin jail, or gaol, as it’s called here. 

The Kitchen Window

Door from Bodmin Gaol

Kitchen

Entrance to Kennal Vale Mill Complex

The Water Wheel

We are surrounded by dairy and sheep farms, a few riding horses, and little towns dominated by the Catholic and Methodist churches.  There’s no cell reception down here, and the only way the blog gets out is because we sit near the only ‘window of wireless opportunity’ in the cottage, where we pick up a weak signal from the wireless hotspot in our hosts’ stone building next door.  Trust us, stone is the enemy of WiFi signals.  Our cottage is nearly obscured by trees, vines, flowers, and other Harry Potter-like growth.  Our little car seems out of place here: it feels as though a horse and cart should be parked out front. 

Despite all that, we are in the very heart of an old industrial core in Cornwall.  Out the kitchen window is the skeleton of a giant water wheel, possibly 30 feet or more high.  It is set in a mill race that was cut into the granite hill so that it could grind grain from the surrounding uplands.  The stream that feeds the race is the Kennall River, which is not particularly large, but runs downhill from the top of a rather steep granite hill for about 7 miles.  Falling water is power, and in that 7 miles there were once 28 water wheels driving grain mills, gunpowder factories, wool-processing plants, metal-stamping, stone-cutting, and so on.  The grain, wool, granite, and some of the gunpowder components came from the same surrounding hills, so a complete and sophisticated industrial system operated out here in the middle of Cornwall, starting as early as the 1600’s.  Granite quarries were started to provide the stone to build the buildings of the ‘manufactories’, the breakwaters and harbors for the bays along both coasts, and even crushed to stabilize roadways. 

The Great Wheel and Shaft

River Kennall

The Bridge to Kennall Vale

Manufactories were started to produce gunpowder components in addition to the charcoal already available nearby.  Gunpowder was used to blast into the granite which was removed from the surface, creating quarry pits that fill with water that form part of the wildlife habitat here. Even paper was produced at the mills, ensuring a strong demand for rags and scrap wood. It wasn’t until about 1900 that the last of the industry died out, leaving a complex of abandoned buildings, equipment, quarries, and stone races all up and down the Kennall Valley.  Now, this area and the surrounding mining region has been designated as a World Heritage Site. The forest and streams have reclaimed many of the old sites, like ours, not cleared and made ‘tourist-friendly’ by the National Trust. A walk in the woods here means encounters with mysterious humps and paths through the undergrowth, ponds that are really old quarries, and rushing little grooves of water, parallel to the rushing stream itself.  It even was considered for some scenes in a Harry Potter movie.

REAL Mini's Still Live in Stithians

Former Granite Quarry

The Crossroads in Stithians

Outside St. Stithians Catholic Church

Front of St Stithians

So Kennall Vale has flipped from industrial to agrarian to blessed remoteness.  It hasn’t moved, but the world has moved away from it and given us a glimpse of what can happen when people stop cutting and re-working a landscape: the trees and wildlife come back, the water clears up, and people like us come out just for the sheer novelty of it. The nearby town of Stithians is thick with holiday cottages, old and new, and their old foundry is the site of at least half a dozen cottages constructed out of the old building complex.  Nonetheless, the village itself is only about 2000 people.  It has a town hall/community center, an old Catholic Church whose graveyard has 200 year old slate stones, a combination ‘shop’ and post office, and a bar that serves food most, but not all, days of the week.  Ponsanooth, at the other end of the Kennall, is similarly endowed with the bare essentials.  The tourist who comes to this part of the world needs to be willing to do a little preparation of food, not expect to get the latest television shows, and not be relying on a wireless signal for her phone.  Or hot and cold water from the same tap.

The countryside is crisscrossed with hiking and bridle paths, which are haphazardly marked and shared by cars in some places, and livestock in others, but still they can be useful shortcuts for the knowledgeable hiker. For the rest of us they mainly represent a good wandering around, and the happy discovery of a standing stone in a cowfield. On certain hilltops the GPS in the smartphone can be consulted, long enough to confirm that one has been going in the opposite direction he thought.  This does not help build matrimonial harmony, especially if the point of the walk was to GET SOMEWHERE IN PARTICULAR with one’s lifetime partner.  This is especially true when the ‘correct’ desired path to somewhere turns out to have also been desired by many hundreds of cattle, thus making it a wide, muddy meander.  Now we understand why there is a mill race of gurgling water going past our front door.  It is to clean muddy shoes in.   But as they say, a muddy day on vacation is better than a clean day at work.  Or something like that.

Finding Unmarked Standing Stones

The Standard Fence Crossing Arrangement

Dinner!

Did We Mention Part of the Fee is Labor??

These same general rules apply to driving.  Once we have successfully located the local version of high dining (which isn’t bad, to be fair), we manage to get lost retracing our route home.  We actually manage to drive in the opposite direction until we both agree that we haven’t seen anything like a familiar landmark, and anyhow, why do the signs pointing to Stithians keeping saying it is further and further away?  We were supposed to only be a mile or so beyond it to start with.  In our defense, the narrow lane has 5 foot high rock walls covered with viney, gorsey growth that allows few landmarks to be seen. Then there is the matter of the rabbit we passed, twice. That was a clue.  He sat at the edge of the road and twitched his whiskers at us.  Silly tourists. 

The nice thing about a car is that although you can make large mistakes, you can also make large corrections.  And you don’t have to walk through mud to do it.  But you do have to watch out for all the other hikers wandering up and down the roads.  We’d offer them a lift, but then we’d both have to pretend we knew where we were.  We’re in the middle of Medieval Industrial Cornwall. Beyond that, we haven’t a clue. Or, wait, we could Google it back at our cottage. Maybe.  If the wireless signal is strong enough at the window.