Circumnavigation of Caradon Hill - again.

We've done this walk many times and it never pales as it's got a little of everything. Panoramic views throughout and lots of history. This is an area that epitomises the 'boom and bust' nature of mining. The area we go through was, until around 1837, devoted to moorland farming and then, boom, minerals were discovered and many mines opened. The population exploded and settlements like Pensilva, Darite and Crows Nest were developed. Jump forward just fifty years and the mines were in terminal decline. Although they were in operation for a relatively short length of time, their impact on the landscape has been longer lasting.

This walk came in at just over 5 miles and was, as the map shows, a pretty straightforward circumnavigation of Caradon Hill. The route was, from the Hurlers Car Park in Minions, down the Gonamena Valley, around through the South Caradon mine complex to Tokenbury, then we follwed the lower arm of the railway to the Marke Valley complex, thence back up the Marke Valley to our starting point, with a slight detour to take in the Hurlers stone circle. All that with blue skies and no rain.

To keep costs down during construction, granite from the quarry at Cheesewring was used for sleepers on the original mineral railway rather than wood, which would have been in short supply in these parts. Although the granite sleepers were extremely hard-wearing, they had a tendency to shift slightly in the ground after heavy rainfall. This, in turn, buckled the tracks and led to frequent derailments and lots of maintenance.

Ponton's Piece, a pair of cottages that probably predated the railway. The outbuildings were used for stabling for the horses working the railway. One of these (cottages not horses) was occupied when we first walked these parts but decay has now set in and the roof is collapsing. If you look closely at the map inset, you'll see that this is incorrectly marked as 'Pontus Peace'.

Now this is what I call a 'retro-kitchen'. That dresser looks as if there's still some life left in it.

Still life with iron kettle, axe head and thermometer casing. An eclectic collection of artifacts.

At the end of each working day, the heavy, loaded carts would begin their steep descent, with a brakeman on each to keep their speed below the limited 12mph.  In 1859, it is documented that there were 27 brakesmen working on the railway.
As a mineral railway, the carriages were not legally allowed to carry passengers. However, realising there were plenty of keen sightseers, wishing to travel by rail up to see The Hurlers stones and the rock formations at The Cheesewring, the Liskeard and Caradon Railway quickly found a loophole. On Sundays, when the mines and quarries were not working, they would offer to carry passengers at no charge, but would charge them to transport their hats and baggage. These ‘free’ Sunday excursions were documented in the West Briton newspaper as early as 1850, and by all accounts continued into the 20th century.

This stack is associated with an engine that drove 'stamps' which crushed ore as part of the processing operation. In the distance, across the valley, is the stack associated with Eliot's Shaft in the West Caradon Mine complex. The valley floor at this point was a large flat, paved area called the spalling floor. Here large rocks from the mines were broken down into smaller pieces, initially with large spalling hammers and then into even smaller pieces with cobbing hammers. And then the broken pieces went on for further processing. At one time, this area would have been covered in some fashion. This was a very labour-intensive operation, especially when the ore was copper-containing. Large numbers of people would have been employed, including women and children. It's hard to imagine how busy this spot would have been and how noisy and smoky.

The stack at Rule's Shaft, with, fortuitously, a buzzard riding the thermals coming off Caradon Hill. The ruins of the pumping house associated with the stack are in the right foreground.

A tecnicolour sheep, either expressing support for the NHS or, perhaps, the local ovine members of the LGBTQ community.

A pumping engine house at the Marke Valley mine. It's not an area that we know at all and we'll have to return to get a better idea of how everything fits together. That this is a pumping engine house is evidenced by the remaining thick 'bob' wall upon which rested the main beam and evidence for a shaft on the other side of the wall.

One of the three remaining stacks on this site. My guess is that there is a large wheelpit in front of the stack and I'm thinking that this may have housed some winding gear for a nearby shaft. Of course, I could be completely wrong. We really need to go back with a decent site map.

The Salisbury Shaft, open and quite deep, with its associated pumping engine house to the left. Is it dangerous in this state? Of course. Should it be capped? Of course not. Should it have a more secure fence around it? Possibly, but I'm not too fussed about that. I've got a fairly relaxed attitude to these things. In a county with around 300 miles of dangerous coastline, the risks posed by a few holes in the ground are not something that excites or alarms me. I may be in the minority thinking this way but that's my view and I haven't fallen down one yet.

A buddle just downhill of Wheal Jenkin, the Marke Valley at the top of the valley. It was used for processing tin and was probably one of a series involved in the purification of tin.

This schematic shows how the buddle works. A slurry of raw material is directed towards the centre of the domed centre and this trickles down and particles sediment, according to how much tin they have in them. The heaviest, with the most metal, sediment out faster and closest to the centre. Lighter particles, with less metal, travel farthest from the centre and sediment out more slowly. To stop channelling of the sediment, a set of brushes, powered by a waterwheel, rotate and spread out the sediment. Depending on the make-up of the slurry, it may well take passage through one or more buddles to get material that was pure enough. Buddling in this way was an intermittent process as, at some stage, the sediment in each buddle had to be dug out; the high purity fraction retained and the remains removed and dumped.

A  marker post that took us a while to decipher: MPBAW AM standing for Ministry of Public Buildings and Works Ancient Monument. It refers to the nearby Hurlers Stone Circle.

Walking back to the car with a lovely sky in front of us. An end to another very pleasant day.

David Davies concern over Scottish politics

While some people get on with their incessant obsession with who said what to whom in the latest iteration of the conspiracy theorising about Sturgeon versus Salmond, or, as some would prefer it, Satanic Sturgeon vs Angelic Alex, the Conservatives are getting on with their important work of undermining Scotland’s chances of ever becoming independent and securing Scotland’s future as a silenced and politically neutered parking site for the UK’s nuclear Viagra. Because if you really think that David Davis is attempting to re-ignite a story that had started to quieten down and disappear from the top of the news agenda out of a deep and genuine concern for standards of propriety in Scottish Government, and an abiding concern for truth and justice, you probably also believe that he was a well prepared and well briefed Brexit secretary who had a deep and thorough command of all complexities and nuances of post Brexit trade negotiations.

Of course, David has the same concern for exposing the blatant corruption, the lethal incompetence, and ministerial misdeeds at the heart of the Tory Administration in Westminster. Oh wait, no he doesn’t. No, he doesn’t at all. He wants an inquiry into who knew what when about the allegations against Alex Salmond, he certainly doesn’t want an inquiry into how his party presided over 125,000 deaths and the greatest economic damage in Europe. He most certainly isn’t about to pop up with any whistle-blower reports denouncing the catastrophic collapse in fish and shellfish exports to Europe or the flight of £1.5 trillion in assets from the City of London since his beloved Brexit was implemented. Whenever a Conservative politician works himself up into a fit of moral apoplexy about another political party, the first question, indeed the only question, you need to ask yourself is – “What new Conservative outrage is he trying to distract us from?”

The Conservatives are desperate to keep this story going, because it sucks the oxygen out of discussion about their plans to increase the UK’s stockpile of nuclear Viagra. It was announced earlier this week in the British Government’s defence and foreign policy review that,  far from the mealy mouthed platitudes that the British Government mouths about multilateral disarmament, the UK is in fact planning to acquire even more nuclear missiles. The decision shreds some three decades of efforts to gradually reduce the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The Johnson government wants to increase the number of nuclear warheads in the UK’s arsenal from 180 to 260, an increase of over 40%. It has been estimated that the detonation of just 100 warheads are enough to destroy all life on this planet (https://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2018/june/more-harm-than-good-assessing-the-nuclear-arsenal-tipping-point.html)

But Boris Johnson wants even more. This is because he wants us to believe that the UK is not sufficiently safe with just the ability to blow up the entire world and destroy all life on Earth a mere 1.8 times over. We’ll only be really safe when we’re able to destroy all life on Earth 2.6 times over. This Conservative government’s decision to boost the UK’s nuclear arsenal to 2.6 times what is sufficient to destroy all life on earth is the literal definition of overkill.

There is no new threat which requires this obscene increase in the UK’s destructive power. The likely threats faced by the UK which will require a response from the armed services remain those threats that arise from terrorism and the chaos that develops in failed states where the UK seeks to profit by selling weapons and tools of oppression to authoritarian governments. None of these threats can be neutralised or defended against with a nuclear submarine which carries eight missiles bearing up to five nuclear warheads each. Each of those warheads has a destructive potential eight times more powerful than the device which obliterated Hiroshima and killed over 140,000 civilians. The UK’s HMS Viagra for an impotent ex-empire carries a destructive power equivalent to 320 Hiroshimas.

Scotland will naturally be allocated its share of the costs of this massive and unnecessary expansion in the UK’s nuclear capacity. Scotland will be expected to cough up approxmately £1 billion so that the UK can keep up the pretence that it still remains a global superpower. That’s the only reason for this expansion in the size of the nuclear stockpile, it has nothing to do with keeping any of us safe and everything to do with allowing UK politicians to pretend to themselves that the British state remains an important and influential player in international geopolitics. The extra warheads will be stored at the UK’s existing facilities on the Clyde. There they will do nothing to protect the people of the West of Scotland except to make them a target and to guarantee their instant evaporation in the event that nuclear hostilities break out.

To return to David Davies, the Tories don’t give a toss about Alex Salmond, all they care about is doing the maximum damage possible to the SNP weeks away from a critical election so that they can ensure that Scotland remains an obedient parking site for the UK’s nuclear pretensions and they can get on with their task of neutering and undermining Scottish self-government. That’s what Davies' intervention is about, and that is all that it is about, not improving and strengthening the standards of government at Holyrood. Don’t be distracted. But keep a look out for what reward Davies gets for his 'concern'.

A chromatic calamity

 

The colour has gone from my life. What was once a rainbow's worth of saturated hues is now an endless progression of grey on grey on more grey. This chromatic calamity occurred suddenly and was apparently due to a blocked nozzle. I attempted to clear the blockage with some patent mixture I bought from a man on the internet. The process was long, and some people may find a full description of it upsetting (and boring) so I will limit myself to saying it involved plastic tubes, syringes and sheets of blotting paper. After a few hours I was left with blotting paper images that could give any Turner Prize winner a run for their money, colour-coded fingers ......... and still a blocked nozzle. I would be more than happy to ditch the blessed thing in the nearest natural beauty spot, but it is built like a tank and I'm not as young as I once was. Anyway, it still prints in black and white. It sits at the end of my desk and whispers things like, "monochrome used to be good enough for you, until you started all this colourising nonsense". It taunts me and teases me with an occasional cyan promise. It was once my best friend, now it is nothing but a dead printer. RIP in DPI.

A little girl on a beach

Meandering through my archive (a posh way of saying 'flicking through a pile') of sadly anonymous family photographs, I came across this one. Such images often ask a question or tell a story or inspire an emotion or reaction. In this case, I've got five unknown people on an unknown beach in an unknown year. So, lots of questions and very few answers. But it's interesting to see what information can be gleaned with a little speculation.

Who are they? I've got no idea. The lady on the right resembles my great aunts Daisy and Lily but isn't either of them. Maybe it's a group of relatives on my paternal grandmother's side of the family? Where was it taken? Probably on a beach on the south coast, somewhere in Sussex as this is where the family hailed from. When was it taken? From the style of the clothes, it could be the post-war years - the late 40s or early 50s.

The addition of some colour gives them a little life but still doesn't reveal anything more about them. I really can't decide on the relationships in the group. Were the women the mothers? To me they look too young for that but I could be wrong.

With an eye to the composition, if it were taken nowadays with a digital camera, it would probably have been cropped somewhat on the lines of the above. The focus would have been on the 'main' characters and any extraneous background taken out.

But doing that would mean losing the most, for me, intriguing part of the photograph - the small girl on the left towards the back. Why is she dressed so formally for a trip to the beach? Sunday best coat and hat. And what does she have in her little suitcase? She seems to be poised to go on a journey rather than for spending a day on the beach. But where? There is an alternative scenario: what if the photograph was taken earlier and the little girl was an evacuee from London? Unlikely perhaps, but that’s what old photographs allow you to do - indulge your imagination. After all, who can prove me wrong?

From Kit Hill to Cotehele, via Calstock

 The weekend's longer walk was essentially the mirror image of the one we'd done last week.  Starting, as previously, in the lay-by near Kit Hill and then heading down to Cotehele Quay. A very varied route and gave us the opportunity to see some hamlets much closer than we normally do as we drive through them.

This one clocked in at 7 miles and was a mixture of footpaths, lanes and tracks. It took us through Harrowbarrow, Metherell and Norris Green and then down to the river path at Danescombe. And we made a diversion to Calstock for a tea and a bacon bap on the riverside.

The lambing season is upon us and these are the first we've seen close up. There's something quintessentially English about sheep in the meadows. It's too early to worry about any cows in the corn. 🌽 🐄 

An open shaft, but enclosed by a stout stone wall, at the East Wheal Brothers Mine. There are some who say "too dangerous, they should be filled and capped". My view is that they are an important part of the history of this part of the world and they should remain as they are. Compare how many people fall down these with how many get knocked over and killed on the roads.

Mine stack slowly being reclaimed by nature. This area had the feeling of not being known to many and being visited by far fewer.

Looking back down the track to the mining site. Just imagine how many miners took this as they walked from their homes in Harrowbarrow, Metherell etc. I find that areas like these have a definite 'spirit of place' that resonates with me. They are not happy places.

Yet another way of saying "clear up your dog crap".

We spent the rest of our walk looking for a child hopping along the road with only one welly.

Possibly the oldest house in Metherell? We think that it might have been a long house originally with, perhaps, the animal quarters, at the right-hand end of the building. One thing's for certain, it needs more than a lick of paint to bring it back to its former glory.

Just a path through the woods leading down to the Danescombe Valley.

The three storey Danescombe mill was working by 1788 when King George III was on the throne making it the first paper-mill in the Calstock area. It is believed that its power came from an overshot waterwheel supplied by a leat from a header pond which was situated at the mill’s northern end. Rags and hemp would have been transported upriver from Plymouth on sailing barges and these materials, along with local wood shavings and reeds, were then loaded into horse-drawn carts and hauled along the lane towards the mill. After soaking in a large vat and being pounded by the stamps, the mashed-up pulp was then spread onto frames then pressed and dried into sheets. This thin layer of intertwined fibre then became paper. For 70 years, coarse brown paper was also produced here along with pasteboard (So called because it is made of sheets of paper pasted together) and millboard (A stiff heavy paperboard used primarily for book covers). The mill later supplied the area with paper to help protect soft fruits when packaged. It closed in 1857.

The green alternative to being prosecuted or shot?

You can't come to Calstock without taking at least one photograph of the viaduct. It never ceases to impress me.

And you can't go to Cotehele House without taking this iconic view down the valley towards the viaduct. And the sky was blue.

To everything there is a season. And the season for snowdrops has passed and the season for daffodils is just about on us. Give it another week or so and this lawn will be filled with a veritable horde of daffodils. Enough to inspire any passing poet?

A walk down Silver Valley to Cotehele Quay.

 A new route for us for this linear walk, from a lay-by at the back of Kit Hill and down to Cotehele Quay. We did a shuttle with both our cars. And the sun shone all the way!

We started at a lay-by on the A390 Callington - Gunnislake road and dropped down to Cotehele Quay on a mixture of tracks, footpaths and quiet lanes. It came out at just under 5 miles and had a mid-walk uphill stretch that give it a little spice.

To the right of the footpath as we descended was the top of an old chimney in a wooded valley - Silver Valley. This was the site of the Wheal Brothers mine. It was first opened about 1810 under the name of Wheal Duchy. When prospecting for copper ore, a rich lode of silver ore was found. Wheal Duchy was closed in 1816, but was reopened in 1833, and called Wheal Brothers. When the 30 fathom level (There are two yards (6 feet) in an imperial fathom. Originally the span of a man's outstretched arms) was investigated, a quantity of silver ore was found in previous excavations. The previous owners had apparently not recognised it as silver ore. And within three months nearly £6000 worth of silver ore had been produced. Hence the name Silver Valley for this area.

It's becoming quite rare to see vintage horse-drawn agricultural machinery. This piece was used to rake grass during hay making, as evidenced by the long tines/teeth at the back. The rake teeth dragged along the ground collecting the cut hay. When the teeth were full they were lifted which left the hay in a pile. More hay was then added to the pile, or windrow with each pass. A windrow is a row of cut (mown) hay or small grain crop. It is allowed to dry before being baled, combined, or rolled. 

Just one of the lanes we walked along. What took my eye on this stretch was the green of the moss that covered the sides.

The green lane coming up from Barrett's Mill. It was quite a climb and was, perhaps, a route of direct access from various farms to the mill. The mill used water from the Morden Stream, which serviced a few other mills, including Cotehele Mill, on its way down to the Tamar.

We don't often see Kit Hill from this side - the east side. This is reputed to be the sunnier, drier side as it doesn't get the full force of the westerlies that affect the other side more. By other side, I really mean 'our' side.

A way marker for the St Dominica Heritage Trail, a circular route starting and ending at the church in St Dominick. The entire route is just under 7 miles and we walked just a couple of miles of it. But we have walked all of it a couple of times in the past.

It is the time of year when the Lesser Celandine really starts getting into its stride. A lovely member of the Buttercup family, and its bright yellow star-like flowers are a sign that spring is definitely well under way. I particularly like their glossy, dark-green, heart-shaped leaves which are quite tasty if you want a natural nibble.

'Tis the season for daffodils and in this part of the world, they grow in profusion and are very common inhabitants of the roadside. Many of them were originally discards from the commercial fields that were once plentiful in the Tamar Valley. These are some doubles. In a 20 - 30 yard stretch of this lane heading towards St Dominick, I counted some seven or eight different varieties but, as far as I could tell, no natural 'wild' daffodils.

Oh, how I laughed after I realised it was me in the mirror and not the stranger I had said "good morning" to.

Two of my very favourite things: Mrs P and walking in the fresh air. Lucky me. This is the stream which fed Radland Mill.

And we finish at Cotehele Quay with the tide just about on the turn. Is there a more tranquil spot than this? Even better during lockdown when there are fewer people around. An ideal spot for refreshments from the pop-up kiosk there. I had a curried cauliflower pasty - not a combination made in heaven. We'll chalk that one up as an experience not to be repeated in a hurry.

The Shamrock is the last remaining Tamar barge or ketch, the last of a line of ships that plied their trade up and down the Tamar from Plymouth and Saltash. It dates from the late 1890s and has been moored at Cotehele Quay for some 40 years. Prior to the Covid crisis, it was laid up for some major repairs. These were not completed and, sadly, the funds have dried up. To compound this, several of the key craftsman involved in its restoration have recently retired. What all this means for the future of The Shamrock is unknown at the moment but it would be a great shame if it ended up decaying on the quay.

Animated Ancestors

 In a recent post (herqe), I mentioned that I was not entirely convinced with the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to colourising monochrome photographs. My main reservation were that, despite being beguilingly real, the colours were completely artificial and probably did not bear any relationship to the way it was when the photograph was taken. But, then again, perhaps some of them do. Who knows. The pedantic purist would dismiss such embellishments as fripperies. Me? I take a more pragmatic view. For some photographs, colourisation just does not add anything. For others, it definitely adds something and quite often that something is 'life'. For these, the addition of colour lifts the subject matter and gives it more depth. 

Recently, the My Heritage website has added another gizmo to enrage the purists - the ability to take a photograph and add some animation to the features of those depicted. Again, it's artificial and, at best, can be described at 'augmented reality'. I've tried it on a few old photographs and, like colourisation, it adds something to some and not a lot to others. Here are a few examples for your entertainment. 

These are my great grandparents, George and Emma Parsons. I think this photograph was taken in the garden of their home in Hove, around 1920.

The same photograph after processing it with the My Heritage colourisation gizmo. I think this is a good example of where the addition of colour works - for me, at least. The above photograph acts as input into the animation process. This only animates the heads of the subjects, and with a limited range of movements and gestures, but does allow them to be saved and displayed separately. Below are the individual files for George and Emma.

My verdict? For George and Emma, the animation works and gives them another dimension. Not quite completely life like but good enough to make them human. I think it makes them look very pleasant and that's the way they were described to me by my father, who had very few memories of them. Just imagine what they would have made of all this.

The software raises all sort of issues with regards to privacy and its possible use to manipulate images for malacious purposes, particularly to produce the so-called 'deep fake' animations that can be used to deceive and misinform. In recognition of this, My Heritage does not allow any 'voice overs'. But, if you want, these can be added without too many problems.

Personally, I draw the line at animating anyone living, without their express permission, or anyone in my immediate family. But, I exclude myself..

The original untouched photograph of the 'Bryn Fedw Gang' taken in Bedwas around 1956. I was 8 or 9 at the time and I'm the one in the middle.

The same photograph after a little cleaning up in Photoshop followed by colourisation. I like it and it brings my old friends back to life, albeit a little pinker than we all were. I suspect the colours are probably not too far out as I don't remember our clothes as being highly coloured.

I've run the Bryn Fedw Gang through the animation programme and just saved what it's made out of my image. I wonder what my mother would have thought of the likeness? It looks reasonable to me.