Cornish studies resources (2024)

16/04/2023

Don't miss Zennor: the end of the road - the final in my series of 243 blogs on (almost) every Cornish parish

Back in September 2021 I rashly set out to write a blog on every parish in Cornwall as I worked to complete a database containing information on the life-courses of a sample of over 4,000 Cornish c…

14/04/2023

Withiel: stay at home farmers

One question the Victorian Lives database will help to answer is how the likelihood to emigrate varied by occupation. For instance, a quick check of the current state of the database, probably over…

12/04/2023

Whitstone: farm labouring and its alternatives in border country

Whitstone is the last of our north Cornish farming parishes. Like its neighbours, in this parish of small villages and hamlets three quarters of the men worked on the farms, with most of the rest e…

09/04/2023

West Looe: the sea, family support and snooker

West Looe sat on the less populous bank of the estuary of the Looe River. The town straggled along the river and up the steep hill leading out into the surrounding countryside. Unlike its bigger br…

06/04/2023

Werrington: no money but a naming puzzle

Werrington is a border parish to the north of Launceston. Like most of the surrounding parishes, in the mid-1800s it was a predominantly farming parish, with three quarters of its resident families…

04/04/2023

Wendron: two exceptional emigrants

Most mining parishes in Cornwall saw at least a quarter of the generation born in the mid-nineteenth century leave for places overseas. In that regard Wendron was no exception. In 1861 around two t…

02/04/2023

Week St Mary: old crafts and new

The parish of Week St Mary was a typical north Cornish farming parish in the mid-1800s. Yet it had known better days. The village which shared its name with the parish was the site of a medieval ca…

31/03/2023

Weird Warleggan: eccentrics and escapees

At first glance Warleggan looks to be a run of the mill farming parish in east Cornwall running up onto the south west edge of Bodmin Moor. It was spiced up in the mid-1800s by the presence of mine…

28/03/2023

Warbstow: on the brink of pauperism

Warbstow is a relatively remote north Cornwall parish. Quintessential faming country, its rolling hills and valleys were mainly grazed by cows in the later 1800s. The lightly populated farms and ha…

26/03/2023

Veryan: breaking the rules - married schoolmistresses and round houses

Situated on the Roseland peninsula in mid-Cornwall, Veryan in the 1800s was virtually untouched by mining or emigration, unlike the subjects of my two preceding blogs. The majority of its men worke…

23/03/2023

Lelant: disturbing the order of things

Why does a parish with a name that begins with an L appear between Tywardreath and Veryan? Did I omit it by mistake last year? No, it’s because Lelant appears in the census as Uny Lelant and is lis…

21/03/2023

Tywardreath: from Fowey Consols to the Great Western Railway

Tywardreath, between St Austell and Fowey, had seen its population soar after the formation in 1822 of the Fowey Consols copper mine from three older ventures begun in 1817. This mine boomed in the…

19/03/2023

Truro: cathedral and clay pipes

Truro’s location had given it a key advantage. The small medieval port was squashed between the two rivers of the Allen and Kenwyn but this was the point where east-west roads could cross the upper…

17/03/2023

Trewen: some prospered; some didn’t

Trewen is another of those easily missed small farming parishes west of Launceston. However, not all of its inhabitants in the 1850s were farmers or farm labourers. William and Ann Staddon had move…

15/03/2023

Trevalga: unspoilt haven or development opportunity?

Unlike Cornwall’s other tiny tre- parishes, Trevalga is on the north coast, wedged between the small settlements of Boscastle and Tintagel. The farms of this parish had been neatly distributed acro…

12/03/2023

Treneglos: women wave the farm goodbye

This parish, to the north of Bodmin moor, was possibly the Cornish parish most dominated by farming in the Victorian era. In 1861, fully 85 per cent of its adult men were farmers, farmers’ sons or …

10/03/2023

Tremaine: colonisation

Tremaine begins a run of five micro-parishes – at least in terms of population – all found in north Cornwall. One of them – Tresmeer – doesn’t manage to provide any children at all for our database…

07/03/2023

Tregony: a clicker and a Jack of all trades

Site of Tregony’s former church of St James Below the long street lined with houses that was Tregony the boats serenely sailed up the Fal. On reaching the bustling quay near the church below …

05/03/2023

Towednack: all gone

Towednack was an unambiguously mining parish in the middle of the 1800s. Three quarters of the men in the cottages scattered over the downs of this parish south and west of St Ives were employed in…

02/03/2023

Tintagel: not what you expect

Tintagel, on the north coast of Cornwall, was a no-nonsense, workmanlike sort of place in the mid-1800s. Its children, sons and daughters of slate quarriers, farmers and their labourers, lived hard…

28/02/2023

Talland and the matchgirls of London

Talland, on the south coast of Cornwall next to Looe shared the fishing village of Polperro with its neighbour Lansallos. Polperro provided the larger number of the Talland children in our databas…

26/02/2023

Stratton: harbour, canal and visitors

There was something different about Stratton. Located in the far north of Cornwall, its exceptionalism was signalled by the fact that its population rose in the second half of the nineteenth centur…

24/02/2023

Stokeclimsland: an overcrowded family and a lone drifter

Like Stithians, the subject of the previous blog, Stokeclimsland was a mining parish in 1861. It was also roughly the same size in terms of population. Unlike Stithians, Stokeclimsland, north of Ca…

22/02/2023

Stithians: Cornwall, Columbus and Cumbria

With Stithians, we arrive at a more industrial parish. Found on the north-eastern edge of the Carnmenellis uplands south of Redruth the parish of Stithians in the nineteenth century included mines …

19/02/2023

St Winnow: the saints come marching in

There are 212 ancient parishes in Cornwall and another six on Scilly. Of these, 60 or so are routinely identified as a saint’s name by the addition of the word Saint. In some places, saint is usual…

17/02/2023

St Wenn: teaching the deaf

St Wenn is a small farming parish in mid-Cornwall to the west of Bodmin. Off the tourist maps, it can be easily overlooked. In 1861 in its small churchtown we would have found Mary Ann Hobbah, desc…

14/02/2023

St Veep: on the roads

Constructing a road along the lines proposed by John McAdam in the 1820s. This was painted in Maryland but the same basic principles would have been found in Cornwall in the later 1800s St Veep in …

12/02/2023

St Tudy: shoemakers and carpenters

St Tudy is another of those typical Cornish farming parishes found in the rolling countryside of north Cornwall between Bodmin Moor and the Camel estuary. And yet three of the four children from th…

09/02/2023

St Thomas by Launceston: a gentleman and a grocer

St Thomas by Launceston was part rural, part urban. On its eastern side it probed into the village of Newport that lay in the valley between St Stephen’s and Launceston. To the west, it stretched i…

07/02/2023

St Teath: slate quarrying on two continents

St Teath in the 1860s was Cornwall’s slate capital. The village of Delabole in the parish had grown as the result of the expansion of the former hamlets of Pengelly, Meadrose and Rockhead, which ho…

05/02/2023

St Stephen's by Saltash: selling insurance and saving souls

St Stephen’s was the parish out of which Saltash, Cornwall’s most easterly town, was carved in medieval times. Now, the boot firmly on the other foot, Saltash devours its parent in turn as Pl…

04/02/2023

St Stephens by Launceston: Draper and caterer

After consolidating their control over England the Normans cautiously extended their rule westwards, reaching the Tamar by 1070. A few decades later, they were busy building a border castle to awe …

01/02/2023

St Stephen in Brannel: the Cornishman who sold a million books

In earlier times, inland parishes such as St Stephen in Brannel in mid-Cornwall were places where the fiercely independent tinner-farmers of Cornwall flourished. This class had energetically enclos…

29/01/2023

St Sampson: saints on the move

On the west bank of the Fowey River, the small parish of St Sampson with Golant lies at the southern end of the ‘Saints’ Way’ trail from Padstow to Fowey. In the sixth and seventh centuries this wa…

27/01/2023

St Pinnock: the mines open, the mines close - plus the highest viaduct in Cornwall

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…

24/01/2023

St Neot: leaving for town and new jobs - dining rooms and railways

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 La…

22/01/2023

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 star…

19/01/2023

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…

17/01/2023

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 …

15/01/2023

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 gentry. St Michael Caerhays had been in the hands of the Trevanions since before 1600....

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…