St Cleer, Cornwall

A quoit and its context

Cornwall is known for some of Britain’s most striking prehistoric remains, notably quoits, stone structures consisting of a number of vertical slabs enclosing a chamber and roofed with another slab of stone; the stone chamber was almost certainly originally covered over with an earth mound. Quoits date to around 3500 to 2500 BCE – the early or middle Neolithic period – and are generally associated with human remains. However, archaeologists believe that they might well have been more than just tombs, perhaps combining the roles of mausoleum and place of worship.

Trevethy Quoit, on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor, is probably the most impressive of all Cornish quoits. Its five upright stones must weigh several tonnes each and the enormous capstone has been estimated to have a weight of around 20 tonnes. All six stones must have been dragged here from a site about 2 kilometres away, one of those feats of effort and engineering that seem impressive even with modern machinery, awesome with the rudimentary technology available in the Neolithic. And the task was not just getting the stones to the site but also manhandling them into position, where they have remained for several millennia. However, the stones, with the capstone poised as a very steep angle, are not in exactly their original position. They have shifted a little, making the capstone tilt more dramatically, producing a visual effect that is even more astonishing to modern eyes.

An air of mystery surrounds prehistoric structures like Trevethy Quoit. Back in 2019, an excavation was carried out to attempt to shine more light on the structure’s history and use. When a geophysical survey of the area around the quoit showed a number of anomalies, archaeologists dug numerous test pits. The most remarkable thing they found was a large stone platform, now hidden beneath the soil, at the western end of the monument. The area covered by the platform is around 20 x 12 metres, and the platform itself is made up of an enormous amount of greenstone, which had probably been quarried from an outcrop to the east of the quoit. Hundreds of tonnes of this greenstone were carefully laid, large stones towards the bottom and small ones at the top, originally forming the surface of the platform.

No one knows how this platform was used – for assemblies or ceremonies, perhaps – but its size is once more testimony to the amount of effort that went into creating this monument and the corresponding importance of the site for its creators and users. As so often, studying the context of a prehistoric structure – the objects in the immediate vicinity, such as the stone platform – helps to fill in the picture, while also posing more questions. One hopes that more research will be done into these enigmatic and fascinating monuments.

Minions, Cornwall

Lost industry

In eastern Cornwall the other week, and driving towards the Devon border and the house of friends we were to visit, it occurred to us that we’d not actually stopped to have a look at one of the many old engine houses that are scattered across the landscape. We’d previously passed through the village of Minions and knew there was one thereabouts, so made a short diversion…as the mist descended and the wind got up. So we looked as closely as we could, and my photographs of what was once the Houseman’s Shaft engine house at the South Phoenix mine show it as a grey eminence seen through an atmosphere as much water vapour as the air we breathe.

Buildings like this housed steam engines that were used to pump water out mines and to haul the excavated material to the surface. Cornish engine houses are generally built out of local stone – usually granite, which is as hard as nails. Thick walls of granite, with corners made extra strong by being built with carefully cut stone quoins, can give a lot of support to the heavy and constantly moving mechanism of a large steam engine – some people see the building as the steam engine’s exoskeleton. Most engine houses have one wall that’s stronger and thicker than the others. This, known in Cornwall as the bob wall, supports the iron beam of the engine, which projects out of the engine house and connects with the mine shaft below ground.

Further information would no doubt have been available in the adjacent building if it had been open, but one can’t expect such facilities so be open all the time, let alone on a wet Sunday morning in October. So we looked, admired the chunky masonry and the tall chimney, and reflected that such engine houses are reminders of an enormous mining industry, extracting copper, tin, arsenic, and other materials. There were once between 2,000 and 3,000 engine houses in Cornwall and western Devon; now some 300 are left in varying degrees of ruination. The workings below the ground near Minions opened in the 1830s (Wheal Prosper was the mine’s original name) before a series of amalgamations and changes of ownership. It was originally a copper mine, and when the copper began to run out, tin was also extracted. The mine closed for good in 1911.

So this engine house saw only a short period of activity in the long history of Cornish metal mining, which began in prehistoric times, had heydays under the Romans, in the Middle Ages, and in the 16th century, before reaching its most productive era in the 19th century. Competition from overseas led to the decline of the industry in the 20th century.* Since the engines have gone, many visitors are unaware of how extensive the industry once was, and how much of a blow to Cornwall’s prosperity its decline represented – just as much of a blow, in its way, as the later closure of coal mines was to communities from Yorkshire to South Wales. Tourism helps, but it’s a seasonal business. Few visitors want to visit and admire Cornwall’s striking beauty and rich history in a rainy October. I’m glad, though, we made that choice on this occasion. Granite in the rain has its beauty, and still carries its powerful message of a great industry long gone.

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* Other mining industries, the extraction of kaolin, for example, and the quarrying of roadstone and slate, do continue in the area.

Cotehele, Cornwall

The business end

Cotehele is a wonderful house (see previous posts about our visit last month) but I want to pay tribute to one aspect that visitors in a hurry (and Cotehele is not a place to hurry) might miss. It raises an interesting point about country houses and their estates. We are apt to think of these enormous houses as the retreats of a privileged class, isolated from the lives of the lower orders, who toil away in workshops or factories or on farms, places far removed from the life of ease lived in places like Cotehele. There’s much truth in that, but it’s a simplification. The countryside has always been a place of work – not just the hard toil of the farm, but also of the mill and the mine – and some of this activity is surprisingly near the local country house.

Beautiful Cotehele is itself close to industry. There is a mill on the estate and within walking distance of the house is Cotehele Quay, the place where vessels on the River Tamar could moor and unload or load their cargo. There were several local industries – mining for tin, copper or arsenic; lime burning, and market gardening. All of these were busy in the 19th century, bringing much traffic to the quay. The remains of limekilns can still be seen a stone’s throw from the water. Mines were nearby (the old Cotehele Consols mine was the nearest) and brought much wealth to the area until the late-19th century saw a decline that accelerated with the effects of the two World Wars. Market gardens produced apples, cherries, strawberries, and daffodils.

The surviving buildings on the quay include the limekilns and the warehouse in my photograph, now housing an exhibition about the history of the quay and its boats and industries. This was known in the early-20th century as Captain Bill’s Store, after Bill Martin, skipper of the Myrtle, whose main job was to carry grain for Cotehele flour mill, another bit of the area’s industrial history. The Myrtle’s working life came to an end when she was commandeered during World War II and blown up by one of the many bombs dropped on Plymouth. Cotehele Quay is a backwater now, but an essential part of the history of the area that most visitors find out about because of the big house.

Cotehele, Cornwall

The beauties of imperfection

Modern window glass is almost perfectly flat, flatter than any pancake. It also has few if any internal imperfections, making it perfectly transparent, and it can be manufactured in large pieces, making sizeable uninterrupted shop windows possible. Old glass, especially pre-19th century glass, is full of imperfections and generally came in quite small pieces. It was often made by blowing a cylinder of glass, which the glass-blower then cut along one side and flattened out to make a sheet. Another method was to spin a mass of molten glass, producing a disc, which the glass-maker then cut up into small usable sections. Windows from the stained-glass one in medieval churches to the small panes in Tudor or Georgian windows, are glazed with glass made by hand in these ways.

Most of the time, people don’t notice the imperfections in old glass windows. But if you look closely you’ll see that their surfaces have a pleasant and characterful unevenness – which also distorts slightly what we see through them. The ancient house of Cotehele in Cornwall was built in the Tudor period; the interiors were modified in the 17th century and the building remains Tudor and Jacobean in character. Many of its windows retain their early glazing. You can see how, in my photograph, the imperfections – a series of curved and linear unevennesses or more random patterns – can be made out by looking at the shadows they cast on nearby walls and window reveals. These effects vary according to the light’s direction and intensity, but are wonderfully clear in the photograph that I took on a recent October afternoon.

The architectural character of a building is often very obvious, but sometimes reveals itself in subtle ways, catching us by surprise when a particular feature, like this window, has its time in the sun.

 

Cotehele, Cornwall

An ancient place

Cotehele is one of the most romantically beautiful houses in the care of the National Trust.* It was built by three generations of the Edgcumbe family during the Tudor period† and its interiors were upgraded in the 1650s. However, in 1547–53, when Cotehele was still unfinished, the family built another dwelling, Mount Edgcumbe House, about 12 miles away.§ Mount Edgcumbe became their main home, Cotehele was second in importance. Mount Edgcumbe was remodelled in the 18th century and its old, now unfashionable furnishings, were moved to Cotehele, where they have been ever since. As a result, Cotehele gives the impression of a rambling Tudor and Jacobean house, full of tapestries, oak furniture and four-poster beds, a perfect and apparently untouched upper-class country house of its period.

In fact there were later alterations, notably in 1862, when Cotehele became the home of the Victorian owner’s widowed mother. But these were done in harmony with the Tudor fabric. The right-hand end of the east range (lower photograph), dates to 1862, but you’d hardly know. It’s a house of local granite walls and chimneys, a mixture of tiny windows and large mullioned ones, of courtyards and towers. It covers a large footprint with architecture on a modest scale – there are no grand entrances or big architectural gestures. Even the towers are low-rise and only the hall has a high ceiling. The setting – terraced gardens, a steeply sloping valley garden, old orchards – is perfect. Inside and out, the place is uniquely atmospheric.

Cotehele seems a world apart from modernity or business, let alone industry. But it’s near the River Tamar, once a great highway for Devon and Cornwall, the counties of which it forms the border. The varied fruits of market gardening and mining were not far away. Perhaps that story will be the subject of another post.

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* The house passed to the Trust in 1947. They do, it seems to me, a fine job in looking after it and presenting it to the public. Electric light is kept to a minimum, which presumably helps preserve the contents and enhances the atmosphere. The volunteers who stand in each room are particularly enthusiastic and helpful in answering queries. There’s information, but nothing is over-interpreted. I’m indebted to the Trust’s guidebook for details about the house’s history.

† Specifically 1485–c. 1560

§ I’m not sure why they built this second house so close. More research is needed.

Cotehele, the east range, with 19th-century addition at the far end

Callington, Cornwall

Built to last

I didn’t want to leave Dupath well, the subject of my previous post, before commenting on the stone it’s built of – large blocks of hard, intractable Cornish granite. Although difficult to work (and punishing to the chisel) because of its hardness, granite is the material of many Cornish buildings, because in many places it is the most easily obtainable stone. In the Middle Ages, local stone was usually relatively cheap. What did cost a lot was transport: stone is heavy, roads were poor, and even river transport was laborious. So masons accepted the huge effort needed to shape granite into usable pieces and to smooth it enough to make an acceptably flat surface.

When you look at granite masonry closely, though, in the right light, its surfaces are rarely very smooth at all. Attracted by the view, I raised my camera to take the photograph above and paused to take in the rough stone. Each piece is a miniature landscape of lumps and bumps and irregular edges, the very opposite of the almost perfectly flat surfaces that can be obtained when a skilled mason works a piece of limestone in my native Cotswolds.

And yet, what character! It’s extraordinary stuff, this stone, and seems to embody physical strength. It may be a far cry from the immaculately smooth ashlar of most cathedrals, but when you look at the wall of this tiny chapel, it has a distinctive character of its own and certainly looks as if it has been built to last.

Callington, Cornwall

Well hidden

To a dedicated church-visitor like me, Cornwall is full of evidence of ancient piety. Not only are there many medieval churches, but these are often dedicated to local saints, obscure figures who are little known outside the country. There are also many holy wells, tiny structures erected near or over springs, which were built or maintained by the medieval church and whose water was said to have healing properties. One of the most beautiful of these small buildings is the Dupath well east of Callington.

It was built almost entirely of local granite – even the roof is made of granite slabs – in the early-16th century, and the shallow arch of the doorway is typical of the period. Its architecture is made more elaborate by pinnacles at each corner and the striking structure, topped by a cluster of pinnacles, above the entrance. This is a small bellcote, an unusual feature of a well house, but perhaps there because the well house performed some of the functions of a church – according to certain accounts, the building was sometimes used for baptisms. Most pilgrims came here for the water’s healing qualities, however. Inside the well house is a trough into which the water flows, suggesting that visitors might have bathed in it, rather than drinking the sacred fluid.

Holy wells were among the institutions (like monasteries and chantries) that were suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s. The working life of this well might therefore have been very short. But the building survived and spring water does not stop flowing at the whim of monarchs. So it may be that those who believed in the water’s healing properties (it was said to cure or ease whooping cough, for example) still came here.

Travel was slow and difficult in the Middle Ages. To get here, you’d have had to walk or possessed a horse. Even now it seems remote, and part of the charm of the place for today’s travellers is the approach and the setting. You park in a farmyard – the farmer apologised for the amount of mud in the yard and joked that there hadn’t been enough rain to wash it away. Across the yard there’s a sign and a very short track to the well, which stands against a background of trees and fields. It’s a magical spot, we might say today, and no doubt medieval believers felt it was magical too.