By 1934, the whole of the Luxulyan Valley had been acquired by English Clays, Lovering, Pochin & Co. which was later renamed to English China Clay. After the site was redundant for industrial purposes, English China Clay decided to dedicate it as a public park. Initially they approached the National Trust, who declined it, and so instead offered it to the Council. In 1992 the viaduct was given to the Cornwall Heritage Trust and the surrounding land to Cornwall Council.
The valley is now looked after by The Luxulyan Valley Partnership which includes The Friends of Luxulyan Valley - a conservation group established in 1997. They are always happy to have new members. They can also be supported via Amazon shopping via Amazon Smile (search for "luxulyan valley" in the list of charities).
The inclined plane was part of the horse-drawn tramway which originally ran from the canal at Ponts Mill to Molinnis (near Bugle). The incline was originally nearly 900 metres long and rose around 100 metres. Wagons coming downwards contained granite and china clay whilst traffic upwards consisted of imported lime and coal, landed at Par docks. The wagons were hauled up and down the incline using water power.
The Wheelpit was constructed in 1841 and brought into service in 1842 when the leat above it was completed. The original wheel was 30 feet in diameter and used for hauling wagons up the inclined plane until the 1870s.
When the Cornwall Minerals Railway was built, the tramway fell into disuse and the waterwheel was repurposed to grind chunks of quarried china stone (partially decomposed granite) to yield a powder similar to china clay. The wheel was replaced with an even larger one of 40ft diameter and grinding pans were constructed beside it. The remains of the grinding pans can be seen today. Once ground, a suspension of the china stone in water was pumped down a pipeline along the side of the inclined plane to the clay driers at Ponts Mill.
The waterwheel ran until 1908 and remained derelict until it was demolished during the Second World War.
Joseph Treffry had the 2 mile long watercourse constructed in the 1820s to supply water to his Fowey Consols copper mines on Penpillick Hill in order to drive water wheels to pump out the mine. The water is taken from the Gatty's Stream using a sluice gate near Gatty's Bridge. The leat passes through a tunnel, bored through a granite outcrop which blocks its path. Before the tunnel was constructed, the leat was run around the outcrop via channels on a wooden gallery which was hung off the granite.
The viaduct was constructed between 1839 and 1842 from local granite to link Joseph Treffry's horse-drawn tramway between Molinnis (the location of the Bugle Inn) and Ponts Mill. This later became part of a larger scheme to create a horse-drawn tramway between Par and Newquay.
It was the first stone viaduct built in Cornwall and is an engineering masterpiece consisting of 10 arches spanning 200 metres which rise 27 metres from the valley floor. The viaduct also doubled as an aqueduct - it has a water channel beneath the railway track which was precisely sloped to create a steady flow of water and feed Carmears leat.
More information about the Treffry Viaduct from the Cornwall Heritage Trust.
In the woods beyond the track to the left is a boulder known as "Elephant Rock" or simply "Big Rock" which is reputedly the largest free-standing boulder in Europe and is estimated to weigh well over 1000 tonnes.
In 1873, Treffry's tramways were taken over by the Cornwall Minerals Railway (CMR) and converted for use by steam locomotives. The project also involved building an extra section of line to link the tramways in the Newquay area with those in the Par/Bugle area. The section through the Luxulyan Valley was bypassed as this involved an inclined plane driven by a waterwheel. The railway originally extended to Fowey but the section of line from Par to Fowey was closed in the 1960s and converted to a private road haul route for china clay.
Collapses in mineral prices caused financial difficulties and lead to attempts to encourage passenger traffic associated with tourism. The struggling CMR was eventually purchased by Great Western Railway in 1896. The section between Par and Newquay remains as a branch line of the national rail network.
When photographing bluebells, the flowers that look blue to your eye can end up looking purple in photos.
The first thing to check is that your camera isn't on auto white balance as the large amount of blue will cause the camera to shift the white balance towards reds to try to compensate.
Another thing to watch out for is that the camera's light metering will often over-expose the blue slightly to get a reasonable amount of red and green light and the "lost blue" can change the balance of the colours. You can get around this by deliberately under-exposing the photo (and checking there is no clipping if your camera has a histogram display) and then brightening it afterwards with editing software.
Generations of plants and algae alternate between two different kinds of life form. One generation produces spores and these grow through cell division into a new organism. This then produces eggs and sperm which combine to grow into the first kind of organism again.
In the case of flowering plants, the organism that produces the eggs and sperm is only a tiny beast consisting of a few cells that is contained entirely within its parent. In mosses, it's the other way round: the organism that produces the eggs and sperm is the main one and the spore-producer is a smaller plant, reliant on its parent. In the case of algae, both are independent organisms in their own right.
The evolutionary advantage is that the overhead of sexual reproduction can be deferred for a generation, so the spore-bearing generation can be optimised to produce loads of clones cheaply with the safety net that next time around the genes will get a mix-up. That gene mix up from the sexual reproduction phase provides insurance in case something in the environment changes or there is some dodgy genetic copying that would scupper ongoing generations of clones.
A leat in the Luxulyan Valley was constructed in the late 1790s to supply water to Charlestown Harbour, 10km away. Its source is at the Cam Bridges on the River Par and the system included some large storage ponds in the valley just above Charlestown harbour. The water supply was used to keep ships afloat within the gated dock at low tide (which gradually leaked water) and to periodically flush out the harbour. Waterwheels on the leat provided a source of power for a number of industries in Charlestown including a china stone mill and a coal tar refinery.
The leat system was cleaned regularly to remove debris such as leaves and branches and re-tar the wooden boards which carried the leat. This work was often done in January and February once all the leaves had finished falling. The work also included crawling in the water through the underground tunnels to clear these which must have been chilly.
To support their massive weight, trees produce a biochemical compound called lignin which has a cross-linked polymer structure that makes it very rigid. Because it's so tough, most fungi and bacteria are unable to break it down. The main fungus that has worked out a way to do it is known as white rot.
The Ramblers Association and National Farmers Union suggest some "dos and don'ts" for walkers which we've collated with some info from the local Countryside Access Team.
Do
Don't
The reason moles create tunnels is that these act as worm traps. When a worm drops in, the mole dashes to it and gives it a nip. Mole saliva contains a toxin that paralyses earthworms and the immobilised live worms are stored in an underground larder for later consumption. Researchers have discovered some very well-stocked larders with over a thousand earthworms in them! To prepare their meal, moles pull the worms between their paws to force the earth out of the worm's gut.
A 70 ton boulder from the fields around Trevanny Farm lies in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in the form of the sarcophagus for the Duke of Wellington. The granite, known as Luxullianite, consists of pink feldspar, black tourmaline and white quartz which was highly valued for decorative work during Victorian times.
The black cross on the waymark post indicates that this is the Saint's Way which forms the route all the way to St Blazey.
The Saints' Way runs for 30 miles from Padstow to Fowey, and follows one of the likely routes of early Christian travellers making their way from Wales and Ireland to the Continent during the Dark Ages. Rather than risk a premature martyring on the rocks around Land's End, they would disembark their ships on the North Devon and Cornish coast and cross the peninsula, on foot, to ports on the south coast such as Fowey. The Bush Inn at Morwenstow is thought to be one of the stopovers from the North Devon ports. The route from Padstow to Fowey was in use before the Dark Ages which is evident from Roman coins found along the route. However it is thought that it was likely to have been in use even earlier still, in the Iron Age.
Lesser celandines are common plants along woodland paths recognisable by their yellow star-shaped flowers. Despite their name, they are not closely related to the Greater Celandine. Lesser celandines are actually a member of the buttercup family and, like buttercups, they contain the poisonous chemical protoanemonin.
The growing conditions for trees varies from year to year (e.g. there might be a drought one summer). The "bad years" and "good years" are reflected in the widths of the rings. The pattern of good and bad summers is the same (more-or-less, depending of the location) for every tree so this forms a calendar - the known sequence of wide and narrow rings can be used to assign an exact year to each ring. This can also be done with dead and even fossil trees both to date them and get an idea of what the climate was doing at the time.
Over 99% of a protein molecule is made up from just 4 chemical elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Except in times of drought, hydrogen and oxygen are readily available from water. Plants can get carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. That leaves nitrogen. Some plants are able to get this from the air but most plants need to get this from the soil in the form of nitrate or ammonium compounds. This is why cow manure, composted plants and even dried blood (which all contain nitrogen compounds) have been used to improve soils.
The manor at Prideaux dates from the 11th Century when the land was granted by William the Conqueror to "Pagan de Prideaux". It is thought that the actual name of the Lord was Paganus Pridias and he was probably a chieftain of Celtic descent, but was "re-branded" by the French invaders who wanted to be seen as being in power, whilst quietly negotiating a peaceful arrangement. The original building was built around a central quadrangle but this was replaced by the current house in the 14th century.
Although it's obvious that you should ensure any gates that you open, you also close, what about gates you find that are already open?
If the gate is fully open then leave it alone as it may well be providing livestock access to a water supply, and by closing it you could end up killing them.
If the gate is ajar or swinging loose and not wedged or tied open then it's likely that the gate was left open by accident (possibly by another group of walkers). Properly closing the offending gate behind you will not only bring joy to the landowner but you can feel good about saving lives in a car swerving to avoid a cow in the road.
If you encounter a gate doubly-secured with twine that can be untied or a chain that can be unfastened, it's normally there because naughty animals have managed to undo the gate themselves at some point (e.g. by rubbing against the bolt), so retie/fasten it afterwards.
As you walk down the field, in the field on the other side of the hedge on the left is the remains of Prideaux Castle - visible through the metal field gate part-way down as a semicircular bank on which trees are growing.
Prideaux castle is thought to date from the Iron Age and originally had a series of 4 ramparts. Small hillforts with multiple ramparts such as this are thought to be settlements of high status, occupied on a permanent basis during the Iron Age. It is now thought that the construction of multiple earthworks may have been the Iron Age way of showing off to the neighbours, rather than purely for defence.
The word "beech" is thought to have the same origins as "book" as beech (most probably the bark) was used as a writing material in which to carve runes by Germanic societies before the development of paper. This is still apparent in modern German where the word for "book" is buch and "beech tree" is buche.
As well as the usual bushes, there are some absolutely massive holly trees in the woodland here.
Holly is able to adapt to a range of conditions but prefers moist ground. It is very tolerant of shade and can grow as a thicket of bushes underneath larger trees. However, given the right conditions, holly trees can grow up to 80ft tall!
The Cornish name for the bird is rudhek from rudh = "red" (in Cornish, "dh" is pronounced like the "th" in "with"). Cornish place names like Bedruthan, Ruthern and Redruth are all based on the colour red.
As you walk down the hill, the woodland beyond the barrier on the left is known as Prideaux Wood.
Prideaux Wood is owned by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and provides a roost for a colony of Greater Horseshoe bats. Roughly a quarter of the woodland is ancient but the rest was cleared and planted with conifers in the 1960s as a commercial forestry plantation. These have now been removed and are being replaced with broadleaf trees to restore the habitat. The area is dotted with uncapped mineshafts hidden beneath thin layers of vegetation or soil; sticking to the footpaths is therefore very highly recommended.
As you walk down the hill, you pass some holiday cottages named Wheal Rashleigh Dry. Further up the road, just above where you joined it, are two lakes in the valley which where part of the same workings.
Within the woods next to Prideaux Road from St Blazey are a pair of lakes. The lakes are the remains of Wheal Rashleigh - a china clay pit owned by the Rashleigh family which operated from the 1860s. The clay slurry was piped downhill to dryers which were derelict until the early 21st century and have since been renovated as holiday cottages. One of the chimney stacks still stands nearby.
The lakes are now managed by Roche Angling Club and stocked with coarse fish but also provides a habitat for wild eels. Despite the lake being over 50ft deep in places, the fish seem to thrive and some very large carp have been caught. In the early 21st century, a regeneration scheme was carried out by the Club to remove rhododendrons to allow native trees to recolonise the valley.
Until the 16th Century, the valley below St Blazey was an estuary and St Blazey was at the lowest crossing point on the river. Tin streaming on the moors filled the estuary with sediment and, beside the river, what would have been the surface of the land in mediaeval times lies around 8 metres under the soil. A bridge was found buried 25 feet under the soil at Ponts Mill.
The Par river was diverted to create a canal from the Fowey Consols mine to Par docks by 1830. In 1835, this was extended to Ponts Mill to connect with the horse-drawn tramway being planned for the Luxulyan Valley. However due to the labour-intensiveness of transferring cargo between the trams and boats, the tramway was extended all the way to Par harbour in the 1850s, running alongside the canal.
The field on the right has an impressive display of buttercups in May and early June.
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.
Today, more than 11,000 species of grass exist around the world. In the UK, around 160 species occur. The most widely sown grasses by farmers are ryegrasses (recognisable by the alternating spaced-out "ears of corn" pattern of seeds along the stem) as these are able to take up nitrogen fertiliser efficiently and also generate high levels of sugars. On dry land, cocksfoot (recognisable from distinct tufts of seeds) is often sown as this is the most deep-rooted of the grass species.
The River Par rises on Criggan Moor near Roche and flows through the China Clay areas around Bugle before descending through the Luxulyan valley and meeting the sea at Par. The river is fast-flowing and once ran white from the suspended china clay; it now supports a healthy fish population.
Dandelion is a corruption of the French dent de lion (lion's tooth), which is thought to refer to the shape of the leaves. The plant is a member of the sunflower family.
Dandelions are dispersed very effectively by the wind. The tiny parachute-like seeds can travel around five miles. Each plant can live for about 10 years and produces several thousand seeds each year.
Every part of the dandelion plant is edible and is high in Vitamin A and higher still in Vitamin K. The leaves can be eaten in salads, though their bitterness is not to everyone's taste. However, the bitterness can be reduced by blanching: drop the leaves into boiling salted water and remove after a minute and quench in ice-cold water to prevent the leaves from cooking.
To make wine from dandelion flowers, pour a gallon of boiling water over a gallon of flowers and steep for 2-3 days in a covered container, stirring occasionally. Then boil, add 1.5kg sugar and allow to cool. To the basic liquor, citrus is often added (lemon/orange juice and zest) which gives some acidity, and chopped raisins or grape concentrate can be used to give more body to the wine. Ferment with a white wine or champagne yeast.
Dandelion and burdock was originally an alcoholic drink made from the roots of dandelion and burdock plants. In the Middle Ages the roots were fermented to create a light mead. During Victorian times, the non-alcoholic soft drink version was made as a result of the Methodist Temperance movement.
About half the starlings in the UK are year-round residents. From October until spring, these are joined by a migrant population from Eastern Europe where the winter temperatures are much colder.
A flock of starlings and also the spectacular flight formations of the flock are both known as a "murmuration". The flocks may include other species of starling and sometimes species from other bird families. As with fish shoaling, flying in unison creates safety in numbers. The whirling, almost hypnotic display makes it hard for predators to focus to target one bird. Grouping together also offers a number of other advantages such as keeping warm at night and sharing information e.g. good sources of food.
In spring and summer, starling feathers change from brown in winter to a glossy black with iridescent pinks and greens. The males are particularly glossy compared to the females and have fewer white spots. Starlings' beaks also change colour to bright yellow as part of their breeding plumage, which again is more vivid on the males.
Female starlings seem to prefer mates with more complex songs - the thinking is that this correlates with greater longevity and experience. Consequently male starlings spice up their songs with imitations of about 20 other bird species, other natural sounds such as a frog "ribbit" and even man-made sounds such as a car horn or squealing toddler having a tantrum.
Nearly three-quarters of the UK starling population has been wiped out in recent times, and starlings are now on the IUCN Red List of threatened species. The cause of this decline is a combination of changes to farming practices and grassland management (such as use of pesticides reducing the insect population), and a lack of nesting sites in urban areas.
After the new route for the railway was constructed in the 1870s, this was connected to a short length of railway along the old route of the tramway leading up to the bottom of the incline to transport material from the china stone mills. In the 1960s, the railway track was cut back as far as the Ponts Mill clay works and even after this closed, the site was used for the repair of railway wagons during the 1990s. It was finally disconnected in 2005.
The reputation of the Luxulyan Valley as a beauty spot dates from Victorian times and there was sufficient tourism in the 19th Century to support both an inn at Ponts Mill and a tea room in Luxulyan. To create a show for visitors, a sluice in the leat at Carmears Rocks was opened on Sundays releasing water in a spectacular cascade. Despite being under ownership of English China Clay during the 20th Century, there was an unofficial understanding that people could walk in the valley at their own risk and it continued to be featured in guide books. One from the 1920s described it as "one of the most glorious walks in all Cornwall".
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