What I’m thinking about while I’m actually making things.
Most of us, faced with an awkward delivery, complain about the delivery company. Joseph Thomas Treffry’s approach was rather more expensive. He became involved in mines, harbours, waterways and tramways.
Newquay Golf Links looks like open ground. Archaeology, aerial photography and old maps suggest it is anything but: prehistoric enclosures, possible settlement, old mine shafts and a buried landscape beneath the turf…
Gravel Hill’s ore had the Atlantic at its feet. Reaching a ship still meant going up a cliff, along a road and into somebody else’s working day.
The families who built ships, the merchant who fought the mud, and a working river with very little interest in anyone's timetable.
Behind the beach were people managing water, grinding grain and moving heavy loads. Follow their work through a landscape that kept changing jobs.
Ore from Newquay crossed the Gannel to be processed near Crantock. A forgotten works connects the town’s mines to the opposite bank.
The car-park name remembers a copper mine. A carpenter’s workshop, a chapel commission and changing mineral fortunes help put people back into the town around it.
A mine beneath a familiar view, children whose wages went straight home, and a hillside that kept finding new jobs after the digging stopped.
I grew up walking this coast with a surfboard. A Victorian railway and harbour scheme makes me wonder whether I might have caught the train instead—and what would have been waiting when I got there.
