Cornwall

 Dear Gentle Readers

Here we are in Cornwall. We left Wales yesterday and proceeded to locate Carkeet Farm. Victoria's maiden name is Carkeet and her ancestors came from Cornwall. There used to be a thriving tin mining industry in the 1800s until it collapsed later on that century, so many people, including the Carkeets emigrated to Australia. Victoria's line went to Queensland where she was born.

This house on the farm belongs to Luke and Helen Halls, who kindly took us in for afternoon drinks and showed us around the house.

It was built in 1846 by Mr Daniels, who were related to the Carkeets. This is the plaque above the front door with his initials and date.

It's not the original farmhouse, this one above the current one dates back to the 1500's. It's Heritage Listed so it can't be demolished or renovated without lots of paperwork.

This is the view from the back patio, simply gorgeous, with many rock walls lining the fields. Luke says they were built with slave labour centuries ago. There's thousands of miles of rock walls all through the UK.

The U.K. is basically one big bit of granite, exemplified by this granite outcrop on top of the hill. That's Luke standing in front of it. And no, it's not artificial, that is natural. Luke took us up here in his work 4WD and the road, well a road in the broadest sense possible, basically a track with LOTS of granite boulders and it was bumpy to say the least. We had to walk the last 100 metres to get to this, through very long grass and many, many biting flies!

Luke then took us down to an old granite quarry. You can see the remains of granite that has been carved out of the hillside. Some of those stones weight a tonne or more.

This is the foundation of a mowhay, a barn for storing grain mostly. All the stone you can see is granite and it most likely came from the quarry above. Each of those posts had a granite "mushroom" on top of it to keep mice and rats out of the grain. You can see one leaning against the second post in the foreground and another one lying in the grass next to it. Luke said they are most sought after and can fetch £150-200 if he sold them.

Luke took us on a tour of the current house, he said this fireplace was completely filled in when he bought it, he excavated it to reveal the granite surrounds and found a bread oven inside the fireplace, which you can see on the left. He even found the original door to it during the excavation.

The floors are all slate and the picture doesn't show you how thick they are, they are several inches thick and very, very heavy as Luke discovered when he had to pull some up to level them again

Out the back (which used to be outside and had a stream running into it), was the laundry. Luke put a roof and door on it to make it inside again. Here you can see a thing of a bygone era, the old copper used to wash clothes. It was an all day job, filling the copper with water and lighting the fire underneath to boil the water, dumping the clothes in with Reckitt's Blue and a pole to push them around. I remember seeing one of these in my Nana's house.

The clothes then had to be rinsed and fed through one of these, a mangle. I think it was called that because if you got your hand caught in it, it mangled it pretty badly. This one has seen better days.

Luke took us down to his brother's house where the remains of an old brick kiln are. Here is the chimney for the kiln. When I say brick kiln, I mean it was made of bricks but was also for making bricks in it.

This was the kiln, now used to store a lawnmower.

There used to be a water wheel here, those granite posts used to hold up a sluice that fed water over the top of the water wheel, hence the name "overshot wheel". It was more efficient than an undershot wheel as the wheel had buckets that filled with the water and turned the wheel through gravity as well as the flow of water hitting the wheel.

You can just make out the centre of the waterwheel through the grass. It would have turned stones inside to grind grain to flour. Water wheels faded into history during the Industrial Revolution when steam power replaced them.

Granite was used everywhere in the early days, here you can see a wall in the barn made up of huge granite slabs. At least a third of the length is below ground so you can get an idea of how big they were and the labour required to cut and transport them to their current location.

This is where stayed the night, a shepherd's hut. Although small, it had all mod cons, a comfy bed, fridge, stove, cooktop, microwave, toaster and coffee machine. The shower was the best one we have encountered so far in the U.K. It was so peaceful and relaxing with two horses in the next paddock watching us carefully.

We have been invited to tea tomorrow night at Luke's place, so we feel quite privileged.