St. Austell Click for location map (in pop up window)
Little more than a small cluster of houses around a fine church for much of its history, St. Austell was utterly transformed by the discovery in the mid-eighteenth century, by the chemist William Cookworthy, of huge reserves of china clay to the north and west of the village. Put simply, china clay is decomposed, granite, but the process is not common to all granite areas - it is, in fact, found in very few places in the world which made the deposits found in Cornwall and Devon particularly valuable. By the 1850s, some 7,000 men, women arid children were employed in the St Austell clay district in the extraction, processing, transportation and export of the clay, and heavy wagons constantly rumbled through the streets of St Austell on their way to the ports of Charlestown, Pentewan and Par. |
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03 October 2024 14:23 | |||
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