St Stephen is known to date from mediaeval times - the first record of St Stephen is from 1200 as Sancti Stephani and the parish lay in the royal manor of Brannel (which is the origin of "St Stephen in Brannel" to distinguish it from other churches dedicated to St Stephen in Launceston and Saltash). The only surviving mediaeval fabric is in the churchyard (the church itself and also some mediaeval crosses likely to have been salvaged from elsewhere). From records of field names, it's thought that there might have been a mediaeval amphitheatre (plain-an-gwarry) where the school is now.
In Victorian times St Stephen was a fairly small, compact village with relatively few houses. The old school, Methodist chapel and Queen's Head Inn are all from the Victorian period.
St Stephen Church stands on the site of a Norman church, dedicated in 1261 from which the font and south doorway survive. The remainder was rebuilt in the 15th Century and restored twice in Victorian times. The tower originally consisted of 3 pinnacles and a small spire over the stairs but was struck by lightning in 1784 and subsequently rebuilt with 4 pinnacles instead.
On one of our walks we encountered a schoolteacher telling a group of children holding a celandine that they had found a buttercup. Children can correct their teachers by noting that that "normal" buttercups have wide petals that overlap whereas celandine petals are thin spikes with a large gap between each. Also whilst celandines are out from mid-February, buttercups are normally seen from mid-April and their peak flowering is in May and early June. Their flowering periods do overlap slightly in late April but by May, celandines are past their best.
Cow parsley, also known by the more flattering name of Queen Anne's Lace, is a member of the carrot family. Over the last few decades, cow parsley has substantially increased on roadside verges: there is more than half as much again as there was 30 years ago. The reason is thought to be to an increase in soil fertility caused by a few different factors. In the more distant past, verges were grazed or the grass was cut and used for hay. Now when it is cut by mechanical devices, it is left to rot in place forming a "green manure". In the last few decades there has also been an increase in fertilising nitrogen compounds both from farm overspill and from car exhausts. Whilst this extra fertility is good news for cow parsley and also brambles and nettles, it is causing these species to out-compete many other wildflowers along hedgerows.
Tregargus Valley contains the remains of a china stone industry that operated from around 1870 until 1965. Unlike china clay (kaolin) which is soft and can simply be washed out of the rocks, china stone is a fairly hard rock. It therefore had to be quarried and then ground down by mills to make the fine powder that was used as one of the ingredients to make porcelain.
The valley is now managed by the Tregargus Trust - a small local charity who can be supported via Amazon shopping via Smile. There have been problems with littering and vandalism in recent years. You can help to combat both by picking up any litter you can and depositing this in the black bin by Moor Cottage when you exit the valley and reporting any antisocial behaviour to Devon and Cornwall Police.
Trevear Mill is one of the earlier China stone mills in the valley, first recorded in 1880 and used until the 1930s. There were two grinding pans powered by a waterwheel. At the southern end was a pan kiln for drying the ground stone.
The separate building at the far end was a cottage to provide accommodation for the miller and his family. This continued to be used even after the mill closed and was finally abandoned in the 1970s.
China Stone is a term used to describe granite which has partially decomposed, but not all the way to china clay. Porcelain can be made by mixing china clay (kaolin) with ground china stone and then melting these together in a kiln to form the ceramic. The china stone lowers the melting point and forms a less crumbly and more glass-like structure. In fact, pure kaolin alone is pretty much useless for making ceramics.
After much trial and error in finding suitable sources of china stone in Cornwall, a patent was filed in 1768 for the manufacture of porcelain using entirely Cornish materials; previously this was only available from China. China stone is consequently also known in some parts of the world as "Cornish Stone".
Big Wheel Mill was built in 1898, making it one of the later period china stone mills in the valley. This is reflected in the use of brick for its construction rather than solely granite. It was one of the largest mills in the area, originally with 6 grinding pans. It was in operation until 1965.
Wheal Arthur was one of the earliest china stone mills in Tregargus Valley and consisted of two grinding pans either side of the waterwheel.
A separate larger waterwheel was located to the north which transferred power via an arrangement of flat rods which is thought originally terminated at a pump.
Alongside the mill are the remains of a pan kiln for drying slurry from the ground stone produced by the mill.
Porcelain was first developed in around 620 AD in China (which is why it was called "chinaware" or "china"). A clay was formed by mixing pure kaolin with a powdered local "pottery stone" rich in mica and feldspar-derived minerals. The vessels made from the clay were first fired at a low temperature and then heated to an exceptionally high temperature, creating a glass-like ceramic that is very hard and tough. The word "porcelain" is from the French word for cowrie shell (which is itself thought to derive from a slang Latin word for female genitalia!).
Bone china was invented in England by Thomas Frye in 1748 by combining around 30-50% bone ash (typically from cow bones) with roughly equal quantities of kaolin and powdered Cornish china stone. This special form of porcelain is harder still, allowing it to be formed into even thinner, translucent structures and has a cream (rather than white) colour.
The quarries provided the china stone for the mills in the central area of the valley, and were already being worked in 1840. A tramway is record in the 1880s linking the quarries to Trevear Mill and by the early 20th Century this had grown into a more extensive network supplying the newer Tregargus mills.
The simplest design for a waterwheel is known as an undershot wheel where the paddles are simply dipped into flowing water. This works well in large rivers where there is a strong current.
However, in hilly areas with smaller streams (such as Cornwall), the overshot design is more common where the water is delivered via a man-made channel (leat) to the top of the wheel where it flows into buckets on the wheel, turning the wheel through the weight of the water. An overshot design also allowed the mill to be located slightly further away from the main river which had obvious advantages during floods.
Before leaving the valley, you may wish to have a look at Lower Tregargus Mill to the right then return here.
To continue the walk, follow the track through the gate to return to the lane.
Like the other mills in the valley, this consisted of a waterwheel driving grinding pans. Rather than drying the slurry with a pan kiln, it is reported as being transported by pipeline to Gwindra for further processing.
The first record of Trevear is from 1327 as Tre Mour. It's Cornish for "big farm". Both "-veor" and "-meor" are fairly common in Cornish place names and mean big/great in both cases (similar to "major"). The change from m to v is an example of the initial consonant mutation in the Celtic language. This was done to "agree" with the word in front of it and also sometimes occurred from a change in usage over time.
According to folklore, it's unlucky to bring bluebells into a house and also unlucky to walk through bluebells as it was thought that the little bells would ring and summon fairies and goblins.
Two pan kilns with a chimney and settling tanks were located near the river. This was presumably where the pipeline from the Lower Tregargus Mill is said to have terminated and would have carried ground china stone rather than pure china clay.
Up until about 1850 china clay was dried in open-sided sheds known as air drys. This was a slow process: in winter, it could take as long as eight months.
From 1845, pan kilns were developed and became standard in the 1860s and 70s. Flues led beneath a floor of porous tiles on which the cream-like clay slurry was dried. The moisture was drawn down into the hot fumes and vented from a chimney.
There are several different reasons why passing walkers should never feed horses. A range of plants can make horses ill and many human foods such as chocolate also contain cumulative poisons that build up over time. The horse could also have allergies to a normally safe plant or have an underlying medical condition such as blood sugar issues. A horse may have behavioural problems that feeding it can make worse, and singling a horse out for "special" attention can also cause it to be attacked by jealous herd members. Some horses may also accidentally bite a hand containing food even when held flat.
The Barn River is a tributary of the River Fal.
The River Fal begins in the marshes of Goss Moor at Pentevale and runs for 11 miles to its mouth between St Anthony Head and Pendennis Point. It is little more than a stream passing through the china clay areas near St Stephen and a fairly small river at Grampound and Tregony. At Ruan Lanihorne, the river enters the huge flooded river valley forming the creek system known as Carrick Roads. Within this, it is the former river valley of the Fal which separates the Roseland peninsula from the neighbouring land.
Hemlock has a deceptively pleasant sweet smell but don't be tempted to try eating it: this is the most poisonous plant in UK. The plant contains alkaloid compounds which cause muscle paralysis leading to death by respiratory failure. Just a handful of leaves can kill a human and a root contains enough poison to kill a cow. In Ancient Greece it was used to execute prisoners including the philosopher, Socrates.
Formerly known as "St Stephen's Coombe", much of the settlement dates from Victorian times when there were 2 Methodist chapels, a school and a Sunday school. A new Sunday school was built later in Victorian times which is now the chapel.
Before the bridge, just downstream of the lane is where an adit draining the water from St Austell Consols and Dowgas mines meets the surface. The mines are located on much higher ground so although the adit runs very gradually uphill from here (so the water flows down from the mine to exit here), within the mines it is about 85 metres below the surface.
A stamping mill for crushing tin ore and a "blowing house" for smelting it were situated beside the road out of Coombe, recorded in 1748 and in 1840. Near the road through Coombe itself there are a couple of old mineshafts that may be associated with this.
As the lane levels out, in one of the fields to the right was an iron mine, known as Bodinnick mine, which operated from 1848 to 1863. It was connected to the Cornwall Railway by a tramway.
South Terras Mine was located across the fields to the left.
South Terras Mine began in 1870 as an iron mine but when pitchblende was discovered it was worked instead for uranium in the 1870s and again in the 1900s and 1920s under the name Resugga and Tolgarrick Mine. A radium recovery plant was built in the 1920s.
Most rocks contain trace amounts of uranium but in granite, the amount is often a little higher (still only around 10 parts per million). As the granite cooled and cracked, warm water circulating though cracks in the granite dissolved some of the minerals causing these to be concentrated in veins - this applies to uranium as well as tin and copper.
Uranium is unstable (aka "radioactive"). Occasionally one of the uranium atoms will fall apart and a particle (which we call radiation) gets flung out from its atomic nucleus. Having lost a bit of its atomic nucleus, what's left behind is often a different chemical element. This element is often also unstable and so has a tendency to fall apart in a similar way. The process repeats until a stable (non-radioactive) element is eventually reached. Uranium's decay chain includes radium (which was sought-after) and this subsequently decays into radon. The non-radioactive element at the end of the chain is lead.
Resugga is first recorded as "Rosogou" in 1304. It is thought to be from the Cornish word "ros" (which can mean a few different things but probably "moor" in this case) and the Cornish word for "cave". The farmhouse is thought to contain some remnants of a Tudor mansion.
Orange tip butterflies are one of the most noticeable and memorable due to their brilliant orange wing tips, but it's only the males that have orange-tipped wings. The striking orange is a warning to predators that they taste highly unpleasant. Intelligent birds such as crows will avoid repeating culinary disasters by remembering the colour pattern associated with it.
The females are mainly white with a bit of black at the wing tips. There will be an evolutionary reason for why it's not worth the females bothering with the orange warning pigment. This could be because the males spend much more time in flight (looking for females), and the resources needed to produce the bitter chemicals and orange pigment are better spent instead on making more eggs.
As additional protection from predators (especially for the females), they have also evolved a green camouflage pattern on the underside of their wings that makes them quite hard to spot when they land and close their wings.
Orange tips overwinter as pupae so they are able to emerge in April, making them one of the first butterflies to be around in the spring. They can be seen until mid-summer then their caterpillars spend the remainder of the summer feeding ready for the winter.
The genus name for campions - Silene from the often-drunk Greek woodland god Silenus whose name derives from the Greek word for saliva. The name is thought to be based on the froth on the female flowers used to trap pollen although its habitat preference including semi-shade within woodland also fits fairly well.
During late April, St Mark's flies occur in quite large numbers. They are recognisable by their shiny black colour, slow flight and dangly legs and have a habit of landing of anything in their path, walkers included. The larvae live in the soil feeding on roots and rotting vegetation and hatch around St Mark's Day (25th April), sometimes later into May in a cold year. The adults only live for about a week but they do feed on nectar, making them important pollinators. Each of the males eyes are divided into two parts by a groove and each part has a separate connection to their brains. This allows them to use one half to fly whilst using the other half to look for females.
The name stitchwort dates from mediaeval times when it is likely to have been believed that it had powers to cure an exercise-induced stitch. Other common names for Greater Stitchwort include "star-of-Bethlehem" (due to the shape and perhaps Easter flowering time) and "poor-man's buttonhole" for budget weddings. It is also known as "wedding cakes" but that may be more due to the colour than anticipation of what a buttonhole might lead to. The seed capsules can sometimes be heard bursting open in the late spring sunshine which gives rise to names such as "snapdragon" and "popguns".
The biggest discrepancy between distance shown in fitness apps and true distance on the ground comes from an app trying to measure distance by accumulating GPS positions. Since each GPS reading on a consumer device contains several metres of error, the accumulation of errors over the whole walk causes an overestimation of distance of around 10-20%. By contrast, the iWalk Cornwall app gives a more accurate measure of distance along the route because it already knows the exact route in advance so it doesn't need to accumulate GPS positions to measure distance along the route. Some locals might choose to summarise this as: "it's because the fitness app is an emmet".
Spanish bluebells have been planted in gardens and these have hybridised with native bluebells producing fertile seeds. This has produced hybrid swarms around sites of introductions and, since the hybrids are able to thrive in a wider range of environmental conditions, the hybrids are frequently out-competing the native English bluebells. Sir Francis Drake would not be impressed! The Spanish form can be fairly easily recognised by the flowers on either side of the stem. In the English form, they are all on one side. In general, the English bluebells also have longer, less-flared flowers and are often a deeper colour. However, the easiest way to tell the difference between native and non-native bluebells is to look at the colour of the pollen: if it is creamy-white then the bluebell is native; if it is any other colour such as pale green or blue then it's not native.
Houses in granite areas such as St Stephen are often fitted with radon detectors.
Like all the elements before it in uranium's decay chain, radon is radioactive too. However unlike the previous elements (which are solids), radon is a gas so it can move about and collect in low-lying areas (as it's a heavy gas). The fact it can be breathed-in is what makes radon more dangerous than the rocks that produce it. Most particles of radiation don't travel very far until they get stopped by crashing into something (like an air molecule) but if they get inside the body they can crash into DNA instead and mangle it.
The main line railway through Cornwall was originally conceived as a means to link the port of Falmouth to London. However, whilst funds were being raised for the railway, much of Falmouth's Packet trade was transferred to Southampton. The line was built to Truro instead but initially failed to make money and was bought up by Great Western. Once established, the new railway allowed rapid exports of perishables to London including fresh flowers and fish. It also made large-scale tourism possible and the term "Cornish Riviera" was coined.
The blackbird is a species of thrush. The name "blackbird" is mediaeval, first recorded in 1486. Since most of the crow family is also black, plus many seabirds, the choice of this particular species for the name is thought to be due to its size. Up to the 18th Century, larger birds such as crows were referred to as "fowl" and the term "bird" was only used for smaller species.
The Old English name for the blackbird was osle and up to the 17th Century this survived as in alternative names for the blackbird ranging from ouzel to woosel. One of these is used in A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare: "The Woosell cocke, so blacke of hew, With Orenge-tawny bill".
Only male blackbirds are actually black. The females are brown. The difference in appearance between males and females is known as sexual dimorphism and is an evolutionary strategy by the males to get noticed more by females at the cost of decreased chances of survival.
Blackbirds can be found in deciduous woodland, particularly where there is dense undergrowth. In the man-made landscape, hedges provide plenty of dense undergrowth and have consequently become a really important habitat for blackbirds. Moreover, many gardens have such a high density of hedges and bushes that they are able to support ten times the blackbird population versus an equivalent area of their natural woodland habitat.
Blackbirds are one of the most common birds in the UK with a population of somewhere between 10 and 15 million. However, blackbirds were in steady decline from the 1970s through to the mid-1990s. The population has only relatively recently recovered.
Blackbirds begin singing from around the end of January but it is normally the overkeen young males initially - the older, wiser males wait until March, pacing themselves for the singing period which continues into the early summer. Blackbirds have been shown to sing more during and after rain but exactly why is not yet known.
Baby blackbirds usually leave the nest before they can actually fly then hop and scramble through the bushes. Their parents watch over them so don't attempt to rescue them.
Blackbirds in the UK are resident all year round but the blackbirds that live further north (e.g. in Norway) migrate south for the winter. To help with migration and also to avoid being eaten by predators, blackbirds can sleep half their brain at a time. This allows them to get some rest whilst still maintaining enough alertness to fly or spot predators.
The reference in the nursery rhyme "sing a song a sixpence" to "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" is thought to be to the 16th Century amusement (though not for the blackbirds) of producing a large pie which included an empty chamber. After the pie had been baked and was ready to be served, a trapdoor would be cut in the empty chamber and live birds were placed inside which would fly out when the pie was cut open. Live frogs were sometimes used as an alternative.
In the Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas", the line "four colly birds" is thought to be from 18th Century slang meaning "black as coal" and was a popular nickname for the blackbird. Whilst many people today sing and write "four calling birds", this is thought to be a modern misunderstanding of what was originally written.
The name "buttercup" is thought to have come from a mediaeval belief that cows eating the flowers gave butter its yellow colour. In fact this couldn't be further from the truth as the plant contains toxins which make it taste acrid and is therefore avoided by grazing animals.
The Latin name of the buttercup, Ranunculus, means "little frog" and said to be because the plants like wet conditions. It is thought it may have come via a derogatory name for people who lived near marshes!
There are a few different species of buttercup. One of most common is meadow buttercup (unsurprisingly found in meadows!) which is the tallest member of the family. Another common one is creeping buttercup which as the name suggests spreads through rhizomes so is more likely to be found in dense clumps in damp places. Its leaves are also more golden and glossy.
Meadow buttercups spread across a field relatively slowly as most seeds fall quite close to the parent and although it has a creeping root system capable of propagating new plants, this only extends a fairly short distance from each plant (unlike creeping buttercup which has a much more extensive root system). Because grazing animals avoid buttercups due to their acrid taste, this allows them to accumulate over time. The combination of these factors allows the number of meadow buttercups in a field to be used as an indicator of how long it's been used for grazing.
Buttercups produce a toxin called protoanemonin, which is at its highest concentration when flowering. It is thought that buttercups may be partly responsible for Equine Grass Sickness. Fortunately the toxin is quite unstable and drying of the plant in haymaking leads to polymerisation into non-toxic anemonin. Buttercups are also toxic to dogs, cats and humans. They have a bitter taste which puts dogs off eating the plants but pollen can collect on fur and be ingested, particularly by cats when they clean themselves. A man in France who drank a glass of juice made from buttercups suffered severe colic after four hours and was dead the next day!
Beard-like lichens (known as Old Man's Beard) are very sensitive to sulphur dioxide in the air. Where the air quality is poor, at best they only manage to grow a few millimetres and may not survive at all. Long beards are therefore an indicator of clean air.
China clay in Cornwall and Devon resulted from a sequence of events that began over 300 million years ago; molten rock cooled into granite: a mixture of quartz, feldspar and mica. As it cooled, the feldspar reacted with other minerals to form china clay.
The clay from Cornwall was found to be a much finer quality than elsewhere in Europe and also turned out to be the largest deposit in the world. By the mid-19th Century, 7,000 workers were employed in the St Austell area alone and by 1910, Cornwall was producing 50% of the world's China Clay.
At the time of writing, the UK is still the third largest producer of China Clay in the world: Cornwall produces approximately 1 million tonnes of kaolin each year. Due to increasing mechanisation and large amounts of production being moved to Brazil, the industry now only employs around 1000 people.
The word kaolin is thought to be a corruption of the Chinese for "high ridge" where it was presumably found.
Mica is a term for a group of minerals that split easily into thin plates. These often reflect light and have a sparkly appearance. The name is from the Latin word for "crumb" as it easily breaks into tiny pieces. Mica occurs within granite and the sparkles can add to the attractiveness when polished but due to the fragility of mica, at higher concentrations it can make the granite weak. China clay - which is formed from granite - is initially contaminated with the tiny flecks of mica and one of the challenges in china clay purification is separating these from the clay. The cosmetics industry has found a use for mica in sparkly make-up.
Black and white Fresian-Holstein cattle were not common until the second half of the 20th Century, following a post-war programme to replenish cattle stocks. This included importing a couple of hundred cattle from areas of northern Germany and Holland which are on a similar latitude to northern England. Due to their high dairy yields, these breeds exploded in popularity in the 1970s and now make up over 90% of the dairy cattle in Britain.
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